An arrangement in which several computers cooperate concurrently in the solution of a problem. One of the computers will act as a scheduler while the remainder act as workers. Each worker has the same copy of the code and is able to accept a task from the scheduler, carry out the process, and then return the result. Early farms were built with a network of specialized computing devices (e.g.transputers) but it is now increasingly common to use large collections (numbered in the thousands) of stock microprocessor hardware.