farm

n. 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.

