thin client

A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a
computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other
computer (its server) to fulfill its traditional computational roles.
This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer
designed to take on these roles by itself. The exact roles assumed by
the server may vary, from providing data persistence (for example, for
diskless nodes) to actual information processing on the client's
behalf.
Thin clients occur as components of a broader computer infrastructure,
where many clients share their computations with the same server. As
such, thin client infrastructures can be viewed as the amortization of
some computing service across several user-interfaces. This is
desirable in contexts where individual fat clients have much more
functionality or power than the infrastructure either requires or
uses. This can be contrasted, for example, with grid computing.