The Advantages of Centralyzed Systems
HERA-B Bologna
Computing System
The Advantages of Centralyzed Systems
- Lower support costs (e.g. software need to be installed only once).
- Easier data management.
- Better resources optimization (the system load distributes among different CPUs).
- Lower network traffic
- Hard disks, tape drivers, etc. are mounted on local SCSI bus, so that data transfering between
CPUs and mass storages never flow accross the network. Also CPUs are freed from
network data transfer tasks (in distributed systems, instead, I/O from/to
remote-mounted file systems flows along the network and require local and
remote CPU activity).
- The traffic between server and X-terminals (clients) is actually very low. It consists mainly of
user commands and screen output (either text or graphics primitives to be interpreted by X-terminal
graphic coprocessor). The possibility to run local windows managers on
the X-terminals itself further
reduces network load.
- Centralyzed multiprocessor machines may work:
- either as parallel machines running the same application through several processors;
- or as multiple single-processor machine, running different applications on different
processors with load balancing capability.
HERA-B Bologna Home Page
February 22, 1996 Domenico Galli