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
(postscript file, 280KB)

Abstract

Project Bayanihan seeks to develop the idea of volunteer computing, which allows people to very easily pool together their computers' processing power and cooperate in solving parallel problems. While the idea of volunteer computing offers many exciting new prospects in global supercomputing and collaboration, its realization involves many challenging research issues that need to be addressed. In this paper, we present a flexible object-oriented framework using Java and HORB that allows programmers to experiment with different approaches to these issues by simply extending and interconnecting basic library components. We also present results from a distributed web-crawling application written using the framework.