ricardo@parns.nsc.com (Dick Smith) (04/13/89)
Tait Cyrus, in his previous posting, brought up an interesting subject on which no one has commented. Which is better, individual workstations for all users or X-terminals tied to a large server. The cost of soft- ware licenses may make the latter option a more cost effective solution when servers become large enough to handle multiple users. Local servers eliminate the graphics communications cost for most applications. Is anyone else evaluating this alternative? Dick Smith ricardo@parns.nsc.com National Semiconductor P.O. Box 58090, MS D3677 Santa Clara, CA 95054 (408) 721-4794
markley@celece.ucsd.edu (Mike Markley) (04/14/89)
In article <108@oaxaca.nsc.com> ricardo@parns.nsc.com (Dick Smith) writes: >Tait Cyrus, in his previous posting, brought up an interesting subject >on which no one has commented. Which is better, individual workstations >for all users or X-terminals tied to a large server. > >Is anyone else evaluating this alternative? > >Dick Smith ricardo@parns.nsc.com >National Semiconductor It has been one of my tasks to evaluate different types of X-terminals for usage in a VLSI design environment. One of the biggest issues that has come up is the amount of additional network traffic that is generated by the X-terminals. If the programs that are being run use object oriented graphics there is less network traffic than if bitmaps are sent to the terminal but programs like Magic from Berkeley run some where around 4-5x slower due to screen repaint times. If you are running xterms then a single X-terminal generates less traffic than a diskless Sun workstation. I don't have any other vendors workstations running diskless on ethernet so I can't really compare the two. Also the estimated life expectancy of the X-terminals in general is about 2-3 years. At that time almost all computers will have the ability to run the X-Window protocol. This ranges from Crays to IBM/MAC/Clones. It is my opinion after evaluating the options that the X-terminals will be good for software development and debugging but I would not want to run a graphics intensive application in an environment where there were multiple X-terminals. Mike Markley markley%celece@ucsd.edu UCSD Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering Apollo Systems Support.