US Patent 7797368 Managing a network of consumer-use computing devices

A managed system of consumer-use processor-based devices may be utilized to reliably complete distributed computing jobs with predictable latency and throughput. Distributed computing jobs may be divided into tasks and distributed to a managed network of consumer-use processor-based devices. In some cases, the nature and characteristics of each of those devices as well as their available resources may be well known to a system service provider or server. Thus, the capability of the network of processor-based devices may be reliably predicted. Particularly where all the devices are maintained remotely from a server, the managed network of processor-based devices may be depended upon to more reliably execute distributed processing tasks assigned by the server.