Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!wesommer@athena.mit.edu
From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X and RPCs
Message-ID: <6939@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 4 Sep 88 08:41:53 GMT
References: <23412@labrea.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Organization: MIT/Project Athena
Lines: 30
In-reply-to: rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini)

In article <23412@labrea.Stanford.EDU>, rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini) writes:
>
>Why do you want to use a RPC with X?

Here's four cases:

1) an interactive multi-player game running on several different
machines.  If the state of the world can be represented in a few KB,
it doesn't make sense to have the central machine responsible for all
the graphics, which would result in more than a few KB in X calls.
[XTrek does it wrong, but I digress..]

2) (sort of the same as 1) Imagine a situation where you use a lot of
computation to generate a (relatively) small amount of data, which can
be easily "expanded" into graphics by a client.  Running the client on
the workstation, making RPC's to a compute server, might be a more
efficient use of network bandwidth.

3) The "client" is actually more than one process; the pieces need to
talk to each other somehow.  RPC is one way to do this..

4) The computation is actually being done by n different machines in
parallel, and the client is handing out pieces to the different
servers, getting the results back, and plotting them... for example,
the computation of a mandelbrot picture by partitioning it into
regions, each one of which is handed to the next free member of a pool
of processors (which just might happen to be idle workstations).

					- Bill
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