The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 28, 1999
Filed:
Apr. 20, 1998
John F Doyle, Timonium, MD (US);
Other;
Abstract
The present invention utilizes the otherwise unproductive minutes and hours when a networked client computer is not in use by a local human operator. The method and system described herein allow multiple partitioned computations to be queued for distribution to any number of client computers when the clients indicate their availability. Availability may be determined by the same criteria used to activate screen-saver programs, i.e., a predetermined time without any keyboard or mouse input. Application programs are designed to accept a common calling sequence. An application-independent master control program coordinates the distribution of computation segments, the combination of partial results, and the formatting of the final result. An application-independent client control program reports availability of client computers, downloads application program files, invokes the application to compute partial results for a range of computation segments, and uploads the partial results to the master computer. One class of distributed computation supported is finding the minimum or maximum value of a calculated target cell in a spreadsheet, based on a number of input cells taking values within a specified range.