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Towards Bayanihan: Building an Extensible Framework for Volunteer Computing Using Java

Luis F. G. Sarmenta1, Satoshi Hirano2, and Stephen A. Ward1

1MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
lfgs,ward@cag.lcs.mit.edu

2Electrotechnical Laboratory
1-1-4 Umezono, Tsukuba, 305, Japan
hirano@etl.go.jp
http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/bayanihan
DRAFT: Dec. 19, 1997 [*]
(postscript file, 2MB)

Abstract:

Project Bayanihan seeks to develop the idea of web-based volunteer computing, wherein people cooperate in solving a large parallel problem by using standard Web browsers to volunteer their computers' processing power. By maximizing the ease with which volunteers can join, volunteer computing can allow people to build large computing networks very easily, and creates many new possibilities in global supercomputing and collaboration. Implementing volunteer computing systems involves addressing issues such as programming interface, adaptive parallelism, fault-tolerance, computational security, scalability, and user interface design. Using Java and HORB, we have designed a flexible object-oriented framework that will allow programmers to experiment with different approaches to these issues by extending and interconnecting basic library components.

In this paper, we discuss the design of this framework, and present an implementation with worker and watcher clients, and a server that supports master-worker style programming with eager scheduling. We present results from two experimental applications, factoring and distributed web-crawling, and discuss directions for future research.



 
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Next: Introduction
Luis Sarmenta
1/2/1998