With the lack of details by the OP, I can envision a typical setup like this: the master machine, say at a University, is the primary machine to run the software on. People can ssh into it, or run at a console. It is the primary way to run the software, and uses shared memory segments for speed.

To extend the capabilities to those on the road, a secondary access method is used thru a daemon that accesses both the shared memory and a socket...... very typical setup in my opinion.