  Dedicated research into the design and construction of a large scale Quantum
Information Processing (QIP) system is a complicated task. The design of an
experimentally feasible quantum processor must draw upon results in multiple
fields; from experimental efforts in system control and fabrication through to
far more abstract areas such as quantum algorithms and error correction.
Recently, the adaptation of topological coding models to physical systems in
optics has illustrated a possible long term pathway to truly large scale QIP.
As the topological model has well defined protocols for Quantum Error
Correction (QEC) built in as part of its construction, a more grounded analysis
of the {\em classical} processing requirements is possible. In this paper we
analyze the requirements for a classical processing system, designed
specifically for the topological cluster state model. We demonstrate that via
extensive parallelization, the construction of a classical "front-end" system
capable of processing error correction data for a large topological computer is
possible today.
