Mask data preparation has become a major concern in the supply chain from design to the fab. The mask industry is facing a number of problems induced by a massive introduction of OPC. Affecting the design flow the exponentially escalating data volume came into focus because the data-prep infrastructure fails to keep up with this development. As a consequence the turn around time from tape out to 'ready to write' data is permanently rising from a couple of hours 2 years ago to many days/weeks nowadays. Computation times of many days on modern workstations is no exception anymore. Especially when mask data have to be converted to another writing tools data format or just a mask manufacturing process has to be adapted by modifying the data bias, we encountered computing times of more than hundred hours for a single layer. We found a way to reduce these computation times by a factor of more than 100 by introducing distributed computing on a Linux based cluster.