In Networking There a Theory to Share the Tasks Among Connected Hosts to Get a Powerfull Machine? How Define?

I m a computer science student i want to do my research work on this topic plz can any one guide.

I m a computer science student i want to do my research work on this topic plz can any one guide.
A good example of this would be SETI. A program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data when your computer is idle (screen saver). Then takes the data results and sends it back to UC Berkeley. A large example of distributed processing.
Another good example would be VMWare and ESX hosts. The ESX server is a physical host machine for many virtual server. All the virtual servers can share memory, cpu, etc with one physical server.