Build Grid
Situation
Teams that want to leverage Continuous Integration for continually building their projects, running tests and analyzing their code need adequate computing power dedicated for these tasks. Also, typical projects need to be tested in different environments, on multiply operating systems or against various databases. A single computer box running building tasks serially cannot satisfy such requirements. On the other hand, managing multiple build computers each with different environment setup may quickly get out of hands, unless you have proper tools.
Solution
TeamCity is built around the concept of a build grid — a central server is managing a potentially large grid of processes called build agents, which usually run on separate computer boxes. Each build agent has its own setup and the central server distributes tasks to the build agents based on compatibility criteria match between the agent and the task to run.
With this setup teams can have multiple builds running at the same time, which shortens the turnaround and allows for multi-platform testing.