processor farm

processor farm

(computer, parallel)A parallel processor where tasks aredistributed, or "farmed out", by one "farmer" processor toseveral "worker" processors, and results are sent back to thefarmer. This arrangement is suitable for applications whichcan be partitioned into many separate, independent tasks, thecanonical examples being ray tracing and the Mandelbrot set. In order to be efficient, the extra time spent oncommunications must be small compared to the time spentprocessing each task.