SunRay: a cost-effective desktop computer solution

In distributed computing, a majority of the computing power in a local area network resides in the computers that users directly access. Researchers learned that placing the computational resources as close as possible to the end users prevented a resource bottleneck at the supercomputer, reduced the networking cost, and provided superior service to users. improved network and server technologies, increased administrative costs, and reliability concerns have led Sun Microsystems to introduce SunRay. SunRay promises to bring back the days of centralized servers accessed by dumb terminals, now more appropriately called network appliances. A SunRay is a relatively simple piece of computer hardware designed exclusively to accept input from the user through the mouse or keyboard, deliver that information to a centralized server, receive calculation results from the server, and display those results on the monitor It is stateless, so it does not contain a hard drive or any other memory designed to maintain information about the user's actions. All the operating system information SunRay needs is programmed into its firmware, so software upgrades are not necessary on the client machines. If an update is needed, the administrator issues the appropriate command on the server, and all SunRays then download the update when rebooted.