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Subject: TranSending the Client (fwd)
From: mieg@factory.ORG (Michael van Eeden)
Date: 5 Aug 1997 12:52:49 +0200

* * * * *

The following article has some interesting ideas on trading processor
cycles for bandwidth.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 1997 17:51:59 -0700
From: michael sippey <michael@theobvious.com>
To: retro-push@theobvious.com
Subject: TranSending the Client




*** This is retro-push, the email version
*** of Stating the Obvious.


TranSending the Client
by Michael Sippey

It's no secret that bandwidth hasn't even come close to keeping pace with
the rapid evolution in computing power. Over the past five years
processing cycles have become cheaper and more widely available, while
connectivity beyond 28.8k remains out of reach of most non-corporate
Internet users. Daily use of the web over a POTS dialup line only
highlights the vast gulf that exists between the power of a Pentium Pro
processor and the measly transfer rate of a Sportster modem.

Meanwhile, the browser companies, eager to win control of our desktops, try
to distract us from the slow surfing experience by chewing up processor
cycles with collaboration tools, push solutions and client-side scripting.
As the recommended hardware platforms for Netscape's and Microsoft's
browsers escalate into the stratosphere, the notion that these bloatware
products could be considered "thin clients" is laughable. IE 4.0 requires
more RAM than Excel.

A team of computer scientists at UC Berkeley, however, is out to change the
fundamental way we think about using the Internet, with a simple slogan
that turns the browser war on its ear. "Trade cycles for bandwidth."

The Global Mobile Computing by Proxy project (or GloMop, for short) is
building products and services that take advantage of processing cycles
where they are the cheapest -- on readily available desktop workstations.
These workstations act as a proxy for a thinner client on the other end of
an Internet connection, and a "thinner client" can range from a PC surfing
over a slow modem all the way down to a handheld device. The proxy can
fetch documents and transcode them in a way that improves the surfing
experience of the end user.

In essence, the browser software (which may reside on hardware with a slow
connection or limited processing power) can be extended out into the
network, where economies of scale mean bandwidth and cycles are cheaper.

Confused yet? Here's an example of how proxy computing can change the way
you surf the web.

The latest application from the GloMop group is TranSend, a freely
available proxy service that reduces image size on the fly while surfing
the web. By distilling GIFs and JPEGs on the web, TranSend dramatically
improves throughput for web users surfing through dialup accounts. Using
TranSend is easy: you only need to enter the service's URL in the proxies
section of Netscape or Internet Explorer, and voila -- instant image
distillation, and faster surfing. According to the group's research, users
of TranSend can "speed up Web browsing by a factor of 3 to 7."

While the end-user interface is nearly transparent, the server side of the
TranSend service uses a group of clustered servers to manage multiple
network caches, the image distillers, and a user profile database to store
your image size / surfing speed preferences. The cluster architecture
enables the service to scale gracefully: the service is currently running
on a group of 15 Sun SPARC Ultra-1 workstations, and has been implemented
for the 25,000 users of UC Berkeley's home-IP dialup Internet service.
Clustering eliminates the "forklift upgrade," since adding more users means
only adding more off-the-shelf workstations into the cluster. (It's this
cluster technology that's behind Berkeley-born Inktomi Corp. and their
HotBot search engine.)

While reducing image size might not be at the top of any one surfer's wish
list, the beauty of the TranSend/cluster architecture is that it's easy to
deploy additional applications on top of the existing system. In a
research paper titled "Extensible Cluster-based Scalable Network Services,"
the GloMop team explains that "new services can use [the Cluster-based]
framework as an off-the-shelf solution to scalability, and focus instead on
the content of the service being developed." In other words, the image
reduction performed by TranSend is just application written on top the
cluster architecture. In fact, once the TranSend architecture was in
place, each of the image distillers only took an afternoon to implement.

This type of network application infrastructure can be extended in
interesting ways... Imagine a server-side keyword filter that
automatically enlarges and colors user-defined keywords on any page on the
net. Or a service that enables proxy subscribers (say, employees in a
corporation) to add commentary directly to any page on the web...which
would only be viewable to subscribers to that proxy.

Or, how about a service that optimizes web browsing for very thin clients,
say, clients as thin as your shirt pocket. The GloMop team is developing
"TopGun Wing Man," a web browser for the USR PalmPilot, which works in
tandem with the TranSend proxy. Since the Pilot has limited processing
power and memory, the GloMop team has shifted the majority of the "work" of
web browsing to the network. This implementation dramatically shrinks the
amount of code needed on the Pilot, since the processor intensive tasks of
parsing HTML and processing images are done on the network, where cycles
are cheaper. Web pages are thus "spoon-fed" to the Pilot as compressed
screen-draw instructions, which greatly reduces data transmission times.

I wouldn't be surprised if the TranSend service and cluster architecture is
soon commercialized...Professor Eric Brewer is head of the GloMop team, and
he's currently doing double duty as Chief Technology Officer at Inktomi.
The TranSend architecture would be perfect for a large Internet service
provider that is looking to extend their business into network computers or
other thin clients, or provide value-add services by transforming web
content on the fly for their end users.

While for most users I still consider the network computing model flawed,
the TranSend team has demonstrated that for some types of client machines
it makes sense to extend the functionality of the browser (or other network
application) out into the network, where processing cycles can be used to
overcome deficiencies in the client.


(Many thanks to Armando Fox of the GloMop team, and Paul Haeberli of SGI
for their ideas and input on this piece.)


Related links:

GloMop home page
http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox/glomop/

The TranSend Proxy
http://transend.cs.berkeley.edu/

Data Communications on the Web: Clustering Multiply and Conquer
http://www.data.com/tutorials/clustering.html




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