In computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, remote evaluation is a general term for any technology that involves the transmission of executable software programs from a client computer to a server computer for subsequent execution at the server. After the program has terminated, the results of its execution are sent back to the client.

Remote evaluation belongs to the family of mobile code

Mobile code

In computer science, mobile code is software transferred between systems, e.g. transferred across a network or via a USB flash drive, and executed on a local system without explicit installation or execution by the recipient...

 and web service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 technologies. An example for remote evaluation is grid computing

Grid computing

Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...

: An executable task may be sent to a specific computer in the grid. After the execution has terminated, the result is sent back to the client. The client in turn may have to reassemble the different results of multiple concurrently calculated subtasks into one single result.