Patent Document ID: 20110040619
Application ID: 12864438
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for selling auction items to bidders, comprising: registering users for an auction service including receiving data identifying the users and storing the profile information relating in user profile data; receiving auction item data indicating an auction item and receiving bid data corresponding to the auction item data responsively to the profile data; receiving and storing quota data indicating a maximum number of respective auction items to be purchased by each user; storing the auction item, bid, and quota data; retrieving the auction item, bid, and quota data which together form bipartite graph data and storing, so as to provide access to a portion of the bipartite graph data corresponding to a subset of the bids in the bid data that correspond to one or more, but not all, auction items in the auction item data, by multiple connected processors; executing on each of the processors a matching process that includes receiving messages from, and generating and sending messages to, the multiple connected processors to others of the multiple connected processors, until a termination condition is reached; wherein at least some of the messages include scalars; and in each processor, the generating including dividing ratios of functions of respective ones of the bids corresponding to a respective portion of the bipartite graph data by respective scalars received in the receiving.