Project Bayanihan

The goal of Project Bayanihan, is to identify and investigate the issues and problems involved in all forms of volunteer computing, and to develop useful technology and theory that can be used to towards turning these concepts to reality. We intend to pursue this goal in manageable steps, starting with the more feasible ideas, and moving on to more complex ones by extension and expansion. Specifically, we intend to start with forced volunteer computing, and move on to true volunteer computing where security and scalability issues become more complex. It is our hope that the results of research in these areas will become applicable to paid volunteer systems and NOIAs when the mechanisms and infrastructure necessary for their implementation (i.e., electronic currency and accounting for paid systems, and hardware infrastructure for NOIAs) become available.

At present, we are developing a flexible software framework that would make it easy to program and set-up forced or true volunteer computing networks for various useful applications. Our goal is to develop a Java-based system that would be for volunteer computing what PVM was for NOW-based computing - an easy-to-understand interface that would allow programmers to write parallel programs for volunteer computing without worrying about low-level details such as network communication, scheduling, etc. In this section, we discuss some issues we face, and propose possible approaches to them. Then, we give an overview of our current prototype framework, and present preliminary results.