Exceed gives distance learning a boost at Bolton Institute

Introduction
Bolton Institute offers distance learning courses in electrical and mechanical design to engineering and technology professionals throughout the UK and western Europe.  Hummingbird Exceed provides the performance boost necessary for students to remotely access graphically intensive CAD design tools from PCs in their homes.

The Benefits

Better Performance for Remote Application Access

In 1996, an initiative was started in Europe to encourage the use of microelectronics in areas where it would increase the competitiveness of European companies on the world stage.  A serious lack of suitably trained people on the open job market, however, pointed out the need for training in microelectronic technologies.

To address these training needs, the European Commission selected the Bolton Institute, located near Manchester, England, as one of several institutions to develop a technology transfer program. In 1997, the Advanced Microelectronics for Industrialists (AMI) program at Bolton's Faculty of Technology began offering electrical engineers and technologists a unique opportunity to continue their professional development and gain a postgraduate qualification without interrupting their careers.

Developed principally for employed people who are unable to study by more conventional on-campus means, the goal of AMI is to increase the knowledge and skills of electronics design engineers through high-quality training undertaken in the home outside normal working hours.

Response Time is Key for Remote Students
Bolton was already delivering an electrical design program to on-campus students based on the X Window System. With Hummingbird Exceed, the industry-leading PC X Server, running on LAN-attached PCs with Windows NT 4.0, students can access a full suite of industry-standard Cadence Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications on UNIX servers spanning the entire spectrum of microelectronic design.

Bolton's new AMI distance learning program, however, provides remote students all across the UK and in western Europe countries such as Belgium, France and Germany, with full and unlimited online access to the Cadence suite of design tools.

Each remote student uses a PC with Windows NT 4.0 and a 128 Kbps ISDN dial-up connection. Using the ISDN line, students access Bolton's Web site via the Internet to obtain course materials, sample lessons and to conduct group discussions. To access the CAD applications, however, students connect directly to Bolton's UNIX application server, bypassing the Internet for enhanced performance. With Exceed running on their PCs, students can access CAD, 2D and 3D applications at the Institute and display them on their remote PCs.

"In its basic format, the X Window System generates large amounts of network traffic as the client (CAD application) and the server (student PC) exchange information," says Phil Knowles, Network Manager at the Bolton Institute. "Accessing a graphically intensive X application such as Cadence could easily have resulted in slow response time, even over ISDN".

LBX Meets the Performance Challenge for Bolton
Due to the outstanding performance of its LBX support, Exceed's X Web feature, based on X. Org's X11 Release 6.3, eliminated any performance concerns the Bolton Institute had about connecting remotely to high performance CAD applications such as Cadence over the relatively low bandwidth Internet. The LBX (low bandwidth X) extension within X Web optimizes X protocol for low bandwidth transmission by utilizing compression, caching and short-circuiting techniques to reduce the size and number of messages sent between the CAD application and the students' PCs.

At the heart of LBX is a proxy server that runs on the same machine as the CAD X client. Instead of getting information from the remote PC hundreds of miles away, the proxy server provides the X client with much of the information it needs, thereby reducing network traffic and increasing overall performance by as much as 10 times. When the X client sends an X request to a student's PC, the proxy server intercepts and compresses it before sending, further reducing traffic and increasing performance. At the remote PC, Exceed decompresses and draws the image.

"We've had very positive experience with Exceed in the past and chose it primarily because of its implementation of LBX. It enables us to extend the performance of our existing local X Window System environment to our off-campus students instead of having to build a completely new system for remote access," effuses Knowles. "Taking our student lab right into the homes of remote users to give them hands-on skills with state-of-the-art engineering design tools gives our AMI and mechanical design program a distinct advantage over other distance learning offerings," Knowles concludes.

Caption:

Exceed LBX support enables high-performance UNIX CAD applications to be displayed remotely on students' PCs over low bandwidth connections.

Prepared by Jay Parkes of Jay Parkes & Associates, Ontario, Canada on behalf of Hummingbird Communications Ltd.  Published here with permission.
Published by the CET Postgraduate Programmes Office, Bolton Institute.  18.04.00  RA