High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The client–server model of computing is a distributed application that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate over a computer network on separate hardware, but both client and server may reside in the same system. A server machine is a host that is running one or more server programs which share their resources with clients. A client does not share any of its resources, but requests a server`s content or service function. Clients therefore initiate communication sessions with servers which await incoming requests.