ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,596,561, issued on April 7, was assigned to Virtual Instruments Worldwide Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.).

"System and method of dynamically assigning device tiers based on application" was invented by Francis Niestemski (Longmeadow, Mass.), Devin Blinn Avery (Madbury, N.H.), Ryan E. Perkowski (Middletown, Del.) and Nicholas York (San Ramon, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method comprises receiving a virtual machine identifiers, receiving VM identifier indicating an application instance, for each application instance: determining a tier of service, assigning the tier of service to the VM executing that particular application, assigning...