A distributed processing system delegates the allocation and control of computing tasks to intelligent agent applications running on computing resources. The distributed processing system includes agents and a server. The agents are run on or associated with any computer system contributing computing resources to the distributed processing system. An installation package facilitates the creation and maintenance of distributed computing systems. An installation software package is loaded and installed on to a computer that will be the server for the distributed computing system, thereby activating a server for the distributed processing system. The installation package creates an installation web site on the server accessible to other computers potentially suitable for inclusion in the distributed processing system. These other computers can manually or automatically access the installation web site to retrieve and install agent applications, thereby adding themselves to the distributed computing system.