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.