Components Of Cooperative Processing Systems
Operating Systems - provide the processing capabilities. They need to be designed for networking and powerful workstations to be useful in distributed systems.
Mainframes - likely to continue as the primary database servers, because their database management systems are highly sophisticated, and reliable distributed database technology is not yet available.
Workstations - the focal point in cooperative processing, because they initiate the requests for services that are provided across the networks.
Servers- generally perform specialized functions, such as image servers, electronic mail servers, video servers, voice mail servers, credit card servers, expert system servers, etc..
Superservers - support hundreds of workstations each, performing mission-critical processing at the node and handling heavy traffic.