THINC: THin-client InterNet Computing

Network Computing Laboratory, Columbia University

THINC: THIN-CLIENT INTERNET COMPUTING

Rapid improvements in network bandwidth, cost, and ubiquity combined with the security hazards and high total cost of ownership of personal computers have created a growing market for thin-client computing. We introduce THINC (pronounced "think"), a remote display system architecture for high-performance thin-client computing in both LAN and WAN environments. THINC enables higher-level graphics primitives used by applications to be transparently mapped to a few simple low-level primitives that can be implemented easily and efficiently. THINC introduces a number of novel latency-sensitive techniques for optimizing this mapping from high-level graphics to low-level primitives for heterogeneous client display devices, including offscreen drawing awareness, command buffering and scheduling, non-blocking display operation, alternative pixel formats, and server-side screen scaling. We have implemented THINC in an XFree86/Linux environment and compared its performance against other popular approaches, including Citrix MetaFrame, Microsoft Terminal Services, Sun Ray, VNC, and X. Our experimental results on web and video applications demonstrate that THINC can provide superior overall performance and is the first and only thin-client system capable of playing full-screen video at full frame rate.

More Information:

Efforts pursue separate paths to streamlined PCs, EE Times, June 2007.
Standard aims to bolster thin client PCs, EE Times, June 2007.
Albert M. Lai, Justin B. Starren, David R. Kaufman, Eneida A. Mendonça, Walter Palmas, Jason Nieh, and Steven Shea, "The REmote Patient Education in a Telemedicine Environment Architecture (REPETE)", Telemedicine and e-Health, 14(4), May 2008, pp. 355-361.
Albert M. Lai, Jason Nieh, and Justin B. Starren, "REPETE2: A Next Generation Home Telemedicine Architecture", Abstract in Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2007 Annual Symposium, Chicago, IL, November 10-14, 2007, p. 1020.
Oren Laadan, Ricardo Baratto, Dan Phung, Shaya Potter, and Jason Nieh, "DejaView: A Personal Virtual Computer Recorder", Proceedings of the Twenty-first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2007), Stevenson, WA, October 14-17, 2007, pp. 279-292.
Kenneth Ocheltree, Steven Millman, David Hobbs, Martin McDonnell, Jason Nieh, and Ricardo Baratto, "Net2Display: A Proposed VESA Standard for Remoting Displays and I/O Devices over Networks", Proceedings of the 2006 Americas Display Engineering and Applications Conference (ADEAC 2006), Atlanta, GA, October 23-26, 2006.
Joeng Kim, Ricardo Baratto, and Jason Nieh, "An Application Streaming Service for Mobile Handheld Devices", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2006), Chicago, IL, September 18-22, 2006, pp. 323-326.
Albert Lai and Jason Nieh, "On the Performance of Wide-Area Thin-Client Computing", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 24(2), May 2006, pp. 175-209.
Joeng Kim, Ricardo Baratto, and Jason Nieh, "pTHINC: A Thin-Client Architecture for Mobile Wireless Web", Proceedings of the Fifteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2006), Edinburgh, Scotland, May 23-26, 2006, pp. 143-152.
Lei Zhang, "Implementing Remote Display on Commodity Operating Systems", M.S. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, January 2006.
Debra Cook, Ricardo Baratto, and Angelos Keromytis, "Remotely Keyed CryptoGraphics: Secure Remote Display Access Using (Mostly) Untrusted Hardware", Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2005), Beijing, China, December 10-13, 2005, pp. 363-375.
Ricardo Baratto, Leonard Kim, and Jason Nieh, "THINC: A Virtual Display Architecture for Thin-Client Computing", Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2005), Brighton, United Kingdom, October 23-26, 2005, pp. 277-290.
Debra L. Cook, Ricardo Baratto, and Angelos D. Keromytis, "Remotely Keyed CryptoGraphics - Secure Remote Display Access Using (Mostly) Untrusted Hardware", Technical Report CUCS-050-04, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, December 2004.
Ricardo Baratto, Shaya Potter, Gong Su, and Jason Nieh, "MobiDesk: Mobile Virtual Desktop Computing", Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2004), Philadelphia, PA, September 26-October 1, 2004, pp. 1-15. (Best Student Paper Award)
Albert Lai, Jason Nieh, Andrew Laine, and Justin Starren, "Remote Display Performance for Wireless Healthcare Computing", Proceedings of the Eleventh World Conference on Medical Informatics (Medinfo 2004), San Francisco, CA, September 7-11, 2004, pp. 1438-1442.
Ricardo A. Baratto, Jason Nieh, and Leo Kim, "THINC: A Remote Display Architecture for Thin-Client Computing", Technical Report CUCS-027-04, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, July 2004.
Steven Osman, Dinesh Subhraveti, Gong Su, and Jason Nieh, "The Design and Implementation of Zap: A System for Migrating Computing Environments", Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, MA, December 9-11, 2002, pp. 361-376.