Running a scripted program between a rapsberry pi and a laptop

Question

What I have: A laptop(CPU: i7 6500U, RAM:8GB, OS: Windows 8.1) and a RPi Zero

What I know: Distributed computing is something that requires a lot of time and effort using special software such as Hadoop which allows communications between nodes.

What I want to do: Test if my hardware can communicate with each other, because I have seen posts that have done that, I have the time, but I don't know empirically if it's the easiest way to test it using Hadoop. Now I have to say that I have worked with distributed computing in the past, but never using different hardware. To be more specific, I want to test if it can with an R or Python script, which both of them can use parallel.

Can anyone here give me an advice on how to test if my machines can run distributed computing (preferably an easier way)?

Answer 1

If you can log on to your RPi Zero with SSH/PuTTY, the machines can communicate with each other. R, SSH, Python, HTTP, whatever will work.

Obviously this would be just an academic exercise. The RPi Zero performance will be so bad that you won't be able to do anything useful with it in Hadoop/Spark/R or whatever processing framework.

_{Advice on which framework to use is outside scope on SuperUser.}