>I was thinking that they would run on the same machine. Honestly, I hadn't considered running it on another machine. This might be an excellent solution, as the computers that are now doing the processing are ~1Ghz. I could offload the processing to a dual 3.6 Xeon machine on the network.
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>Is this solid enough? Can you point me towards any good examples of doing this?

No idea.

>re: the original idea though, it would seem that if the process wasn't maxing the CPU, that running multiple "threads" of the same process would speed things up, no?

I was thinking no, but perhaps if there are two threads, they will, in total, receive a larger share of processing power (assuming that other programs are hogging CPU power). On the other hand, if this is the case, a better solution might be to increase the priority of your task. I don't know whether this can be done temporarily.

Anyway, the point is that the usual reason that multiple threads are used are:

To share work among several processors, if available.

To allow the user to do something in the foreground while some program does a long processing in the background.

I don't think that with a single CPU, your task will be significantly faster just for using threads; the "background" stuff is the relevant part in this case.

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire... (from Gulliver's Travels)