US Patent 9817701 Threshold computing in a distributed computing system

A computing device includes an interface configured to interface and communicate with a dispersed storage network (DSN), a memory that stores operational instructions, and a processing module operably coupled to the interface and memory such that the processing module, when operable within the computing device based on the operational instructions, is configured to perform various operations. The computing device selects a subset of the other computing devices to perform a computing task on a data object. The computing device determines processing parameters of the data and determines task partitioning. The computing device also processes the data based on processing parameters to generate data slice groupings and partitions the task based on the task partitioning to generate partial tasks. The computing device obtains and processes at least the decode threshold number of the plurality of partial results generated by the subset of the other computing devices to generate a result.