Threading server application design?

Good day everyone, I'm currently working on designing a custom application. This application will need to poll remote systems over the network, process this data, and serve the processed data to several other computers, all in relatively real time. I'm curious as to people's opinions on how to go about the overall design. Should the processing and polling happen in a main thread with other threads handling the server side of things? Or should I create a process for each task and work over some sort of IPC? I'm fairly new to sockets and multithreading on Linux so any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, J