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This article is from the Star Trek Tech FAQ, by Joshua Bell inexorabletash@hotmail.com with numerous contributions by others.

29 "Why aren't the computers distributed?" (Holodeck and Computers - Star Trek)

The three main computer cores are equipped with low level subspace
field generators. This allows signal propagation within the cores at
Faster-Than-Light (FTL) speeds, allowing the computers to perform much
faster than anything constructable given 20th century technology, even
theoretically. This cannot be applied (by 24th century technology) to
smaller computers.

Once again, the ODN has enough distributed computational power on its
own to run the ship, if all the cores are rendered inoperable. So the
redundancy is there; look at how often on the show the computers are
inaccessible, yet the ship can still be controlled. Also, all of the
consoles are also operating independently. They have nanoprocessors
and are always receiving a flood of data from the network, and
interpreting and displaying it as the user wants it. So the
computation as we think of it is distributed. Think of it as using a
workstation farm for interfaces and data visualization, while running
big jobs on a few networked Crays.

 

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