from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
processor farm
farm
<computer, parallel> A {parallel processor} where tasks are
distributed, or "farmed out", by one "farmer" processor to
several "worker" processors, and results are sent back to the
farmer. This arrangement is suitable for {applications} which
can be partitioned into many separate, independent tasks, the
canonical examples being {ray tracing} and the {Mandelbrot
set}. In order to be efficient, the extra time spent on
communications must be small compared to the time spent
processing each task.
(2001-05-28)