farm

A group of machines, especially a large group of near-identical machines running load-balancing software, dedicated to a single task. Historically the term server farm, used especially for a group of web servers, seems to have been coined by analogy with earlier {disk farm} in the early 1990s; generalization began with render farm for a group of machines dedicated to rendering computer animations (this term appears to have been popularized by publicity about the pioneering "Linux render farm" used to produce the movie Titanic). By 2001 other combinations such as "compile farm" and "compute farm" were increasingly common, and arguably borderline techspeak. More jargon uses seem likely to arise (and be absorbed into techspeak over time) as new uses are discovered for networked machine clusters. Compare {link farm}.

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