Project Bayanihan

Bayanihan (pronounced buy-uh-nee-hun) -- a Filipino tradition wherein neighbors would help a relocating family by gathering under their house, and carrying it to its new location. More generally, the word bayanihan has come to mean a communal spirit that makes seemingly impossible feats possible through the power of unity and cooperation.

We have a new web site: http://bayanihancomputing.net/

Project Bayanihan at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science aims to explore and develop the idea of volunteer computing, which enables people to join a large parallel computation by simply visiting a Web site with an appropriate browser. Because volunteering requires no prior human contact and very little technical knowledge, it becomes very easy to build very large computing networks. This creates exciting new possibilities. With true volunteer systems, one can reach new heights in performance by using many thousands of anonymous volunteer nodes around the world. On a smaller but more practical scale, companies or institutions can use private "forced" volunteer systems to pool together their internal computing resources with minimal administration costs. Many other interesting variations, such as networks of information appliances (NOIAs), paid volunteer systems, and barter trade of computing resources, are also possible.

Currently, we are developing a software framework using Java and HORB, with the goal of providing enough flexibility to let us explore these many possibilities, as well as study different ways to address relevant issues that arise such as adaptive parallelism, programmability, fault-tolerance, security, sabotage-tolerance, scalability, and user-interface design.

What's New

• Bayanihan has moved! Check out http://bayanihancomputing.net/
• A new paper: Bayanihan Computing .NET: Grid Computing with XML Web Services, to appear in the Global and Peer-to-Peer Computing Workshop at CCGrid 2002, Berlin, Germany, May 2002.
  • (2-page short paper).
• Ph.D. thesis: Luis F. G. Sarmenta. Volunteer Computing. Ph.D. thesis. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, March 2001.
  
  • Abstract
  • PDF, 1.6MB
• Best Paper Finalist: Luis F. G. Sarmenta. Sabotage-Tolerance Mechanisms for Volunteer Computing Systems. ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'01), Brisbane, Australia, May 15-18, 2001.
  
  • PDF, 208KB
  • postscript, 617KB
  • PowerPoint, 781KB

Demos (offline)

Papers

• Luis F. G. Sarmenta. Bayanihan: Web-Based Volunteer Computing Using Java. Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on World-Wide Computing and its Applications (WWCA'98), Tsukuba, Japan, March 3-4, 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1368, Springer-Verlag, 1998. pp. 444-461.
  
  • postscript, 309KB
  • HTML
  • Slides
  • Mandelbrot Demo (Sorry, this is off-line at the moment.)
• Luis F. G. Sarmenta, Satoshi Hirano, Stephen A. Ward. Towards Bayanihan: Building an Extensible Framework for Volunteer Computing Using Java. ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for High-Performance Network Computing, Palo Alto, California, Feb. 28 - Mar. 1, 1998. Published in Concurrency: Practice and Experience, Vol. 10(11-13), 1015-1019 (1998)
  
  • postscript, 5 pages, 280KB
  • HTML
• Luis F. G. Sarmenta, Satoshi Hirano. Bayanihan: Building and Studying Volunteer Computing Systems Using Java. To appear in Future Generation Computer Systems Special Issue on Metacomputing, Vol. 15, No. 5/6. Elsevier Publ., 1999.
  
  • postscript, 2.1MB
  • HTML
• Luis F. G. Sarmenta. An Adaptive, Fault-tolerant Implementation of BSP for Java-based Volunteer Computing Systems. IPPS'99 Workshop on Java for Parallel and Distributed Computing, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Apr. 12-16, 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1586, Springer-Verlag, 1999. pp. 763-780.
  
  • postscript, 280KB
  • HTML
• Luis F. G. Sarmenta. Sabotage-Tolerance Mechanisms for Volunteer Computing Systems. ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'01), Brisbane, Australia, May 15-18, 2001. (Best Paper Finalist)
  
  • PDF, 208KB
  • postscript, 617KB
  • PowerPoint, 781KB
• Luis F. G. Sarmenta. Studying Sabotage-Tolerance Mechanisms through Web-based Parallel Parametric Analysis and Monte Carlo Simulation. To appear in Internet Computing 2001 (in PDPTA 2001 Multiconference), Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2001.
  
  • PDF
  • PowerPoint

Thesis

• Luis F. G. Sarmenta. Volunteer Computing. Ph.D. thesis. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, March 2001.
  
  • Abstract
  • PDF, 1.6MB

Presentations

• SC97: ACM/IEEE International Conference on High Performance Networking and Computing San Jose, California, Nov. 17 to 20, 1997 Research Exhibit booth (R102, behind Sun Microsystems) demonstrating Project Bayanihan.
  Some items from our exhibit:
  • A draft paper: "Bayanihan: Web-Based Volunteer Computing Using Java". (See final version listed above.)
  • Posters displayed in our booth. (These summarize the paper.)
  • Pictures of our booth and our neighbors.
  
  
• ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for High-Performance Network Computing Palo Alto, California, Feb. 28 - Mar. 1, 1998. Poster presentation.
  Some items from our exhibit:
  • Posters (will be posted here when available)
  
  
• EuroPar'98, EuroTools Workshop on Tools for High Performance Metacomputing, Southampton, UK, Sept. 3, 1998.
  • Abstract. "Bayanihan: Building Volunteer Computing Systems Using Java"
  • Slides

More Information

Project Bayanihan is still under active development. For more information, please send email to: Luis Sarmenta (lfgs@cag.lcs.mit.edu).