multi user computing

Everything old is new

This multi-user model is not new. During the 1960s, when computers were all mainframes and cost millions, multi-user computing, in the form of time-sharing (where we rented access by the hour using low-cost "dumb terminals"), was our first tool for expanding the market from the "Fortunate 500" to the rest of us.

This model continued through the 1970s, with US$100,000 and, ultimately, US$10,000 minicomputers further expanding the market. In the 1980s came the PC and the world changed; ultimately, we all got our own computers.

Although the last 10 years have seen very little movement in the price of low-end PCs, technology advances have turned the 2007 entry-level PC into a very muscular piece of technology whose gigapower is more than 1,000 times that of a US$400 box built in 1998. Only a fraction of today's PC users, such as computational scientists, extreme gamers, graphic artists and industrial designers use more than a few percent of what these mainframes on a desk can offer.

As a result, the vast majority of those CPU cycles are wasted, burning energy (150 to 200 watts per box) which is costly and scarce in these markets and becoming ever more costly to own. So why not harness and share this extra capacity and resurrect these proven techniques and technologies from the past to take today's "mainframe on a desk" and put its power to work?

Enterprise computer users have been benefiting from the PC version of multi-user computing since 1990, something our industry has dubbed "server-based computing". Blade computing and virtualisation are the latest twists on this same multi-user concept.

However, these enterprise software and hardware components are expensive. The software licences alone often add up to more than the cost of the full or stripped-down PCs being used as the access terminals. These terminals (thin clients) are themselves as expensive as low-end PCs. It has been, thus far, a technology for the rich and fortunate.

A number of new firms, including my own company, NComputing, have reincarnated the thin client with non-CPU-based access terminals. Access terminals are being built today at costs as low as US$11 and sold for well under US$100 per user. At the same time, they provide manufacturers, distributors, resellers and maintenance partners with full commercial margins.

The expensive software and high-end servers have been replaced by low-cost or free software and desktop PCs. These multi-user environments tap the power of low-end PCs to support 10 or more concurrent users, with power consumption of under six watts per user.