toasters

I will state what I thought was obvious: I need to make "calls" to
thousands of machines to do something. I want to minimize the overhead
both of making the call and the machines sending back the responses.

Maybe you could start off a little bit further back into the problem
today. Like, "I got up this morning, and I thought, 'I would like some
toast.', but I don't know how to make toast, so I wanted to design a
100,000 node parallel neural network to develop a receipie for toast."

Perhaps then someone on this list could relate their toast development
experiences, such as "using a TCP-based tree topology similar to IRC
servers has been sufficient in my experience for toast-oriented data
exchange although I have been using a parallelized coordinated genetic
algorithm rather than a neural network to develop an optimal
crunch/warmth experience", or possibly "ToastVortex, my Twisted-basted
toast application server is available at
http://toastvortex.example.com/" or better yet, "buy a toaster and put
some bread in it".