| Summary: | Server Based Computing (SBC) technology allows applications to be deployed, managed, supported and executed on the server and not on the client; only the screen information is transmitted between the server and client. This architecture solves many fundamental problems with application deployment, technical support, data storage, hardware and software upgrades. This thesis is targeted at upgrading and evaluating performance of thin clients in scientific Server Based Computing (SBC). Performance of Linux based SBC was assessed via methods of both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative method used benchmarks that measured typical-load performance with SAR and graphics performance with X11perf, Xbench and SPECviewperf. Structured interview, a qualitative research method, was adopted in which the number of open-ended questions in specific order was presented to users in order to estimate user-perceived performance. The first performance bottleneck identified was the CPU speed. The second performance bottleneck, with respect to graphics intensive applications, includes the network latency of the X11 protocol and the subsequent performance of old thin clients. An upgrade of both the computational server and thin clients was suggested. The evaluation after the upgrade involved performance analysis via quantitative and qualitative methods. The results showed that the new configuration had improved the performance.
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