Collaborative Computing

Also called cooperative computing, collaborative computing enables computers in a distributed computing environment to share processing power in addition to data, resources, and services. In a collaborative computing environment, one computer might borrow processing power by running a program on another computer on the network. Or, processes might be designed so they can run on two or more computers. Collaborative computing cannot take place without a network to enable the various computers to communicate. A person browsing the Internet is an example of collaborative computing. On the Internet, Web servers actively use resources to give your computer information about how a Web page should look, includings its colors, its font sizes, and what graphics should display. Your computer uses its processing power to interpret this informa- tion and to display it in the format intended by the designer. Another example of collaborative computing is Microsoft server-based products such as Exchange Server or SQL Server. For both of these products, requests originate from intelligent client software(which uses the processor power of the workstation it is running on)  but then are serviced from server software running on a Windows  NT server. The server then processes the request using its own resources and passes the results back to the client. Processor and memory resources on both the client and the server are utilized in the completion of the task. In the future, you can expect collaborative computing to provide even greater amounts of computing power. This might happen through a new capability of computers to detect which PCs are idle on the network and to harness the CPU power or RAM of the idle PCs for use in processing. In summary, collaborative computing involves the following:   Multiple computers cooperating to perform a task  Software designed to take advantage of the collaborative environment