Forum: Ruby Discussion - SMART paralell processing

suppose I have a program:
###
def process_string(str)
        return str.reverse #a simple processing mentioned here-but in
real a heavy process is there ~20 minutes
end
str=gets.chomp
str_p=process_string(str)
puts str_p
###

Here the method process_string is written very simple, just for the
completion of the code, but in my case it is a very heavy; processing
takes > 20 minutes, thats why I want it to be processed using many
machines parallely on LAN.

So I have a list of strings as input, I want to process each, I have 4
systems in LAN, I want to use all the systems paralelly-so get a sring
give it to a system-that will return a processed output to one machine-
or simple I want to collect all output-how to achieve this?

Lets discuss on it and get one of the complete suggestion and discuss
about all possibilities (advantages and disadvantages for each options)
and make this thread a complete one.

Something like this has already been discussed. The topic was "working
on multiple machines in a LAN"

There are some useful starting points in there.