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A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers usually
maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability
of one machine. Often, server farms will have both a primary and a backup server
allocated to a single task, so that in the event of the failure of the primary
server, a backup server will take over the primary server's function.
Server farms are typically co-located with the network switches and/or routers
which enable communication between the different parts of the cluster and the
users of the cluster.
Server farms are commonly used for cluster computing. Many modern supercomputers
consist of giant server farms of high-speed processors connected by either
Gigabit Ethernet or custom interconnects such as Myrinet.
Another common use of server farms is for web hosting, which are sometimes
referred to as web farms.
Server farms are increasingly being used instead of or in addition to mainframe
computers by large enterprises, although server farms do not as yet reach the
same reliability levels as mainframes. Because of the sheer number of computers
in large server farms, the failure of individual machines is a commonplace
event, and the management of large server farms needs to take this into account,
by providing support for redundancy, automatic failover, and rapid
reconfiguration of the server cluster.
The performance of the very largest server farms (thousands of processors and
up) is typically limited by the performance of the data center's cooling systems
rather than by the performance of the processors. For this reason, the critical
design parameter for such systems tends to be performance per Watt of generated
heat, rather than performance per processor.
A wiki farm is a server farm that provides wiki hosting, or a group of wikis
hosted on such servers.
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