Kind of both. Is a pool like a group or what? And yes i am trying to set up workers or figure out how it works. What I am trying to do is see it from the server side a little bit to better mine.
A pool you combine your hashing power to mine blocks together. If you do it on your own its solo mining. BTC difficulty is so high and so much hash power going it takes a huge amount of power to solo at this point. (Unless you got really really lucky). Pool mining is way most go.
As far as mining on CPU or gpu sadly those day's are over. It will cost more then you make. Look over in hardware section at asics as you will need one to mine BTC.