2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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farm
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. A group of machines, especially a large group of near-identical machines
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running load-balancing software, dedicated to a single task. Historically
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the term server farm , used especially for a group of web servers, seems to
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have been coined by analogy with earlier disk farm in the early 1990s;
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generalization began with render farm for a group of machines dedicated to
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rendering computer animations (this term appears to have been popularized by
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publicity about the pioneering Linux render farm used to produce the movie
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Titanic ). By 2001 other combinations such as compile farm and compute farm
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were increasingly common, and arguably borderline techspeak. More jargon
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uses seem likely to arise (and be absorbed into techspeak over time) as new
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uses are discovered for networked machine clusters. Compare link farm.
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