Bayanihan is a Filipino word meaning a community spirit of unity and cooperation that makes seemingly impossible tasks possible through the concerted effort of many people working together on a common goal. Project Bayanihan seeks to bring the bayanihan spirit to global computing by developing the idea of volunteer computing, which allows ``ordinary'' people with little technical expertise to 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 addressing many challenging issues such as adaptive parallelism, fault-tolerance, computational security, and scalability [7].
To address these issues, we have built a software framework using Java and HORB [5], a distributed object library similar to RMI but not requiring JDK 1.1 (which, unfortunately, is presently not as ubiquitous as JDK 1.0). By allowing programmers to access remote objects without worrying about network communication details, HORB allows us to take full advantage of object-oriented techniques to build an extensible framework [6] that lets programmers experiment with different approaches to research issues by simply filling-in appropriate hot-spots in the framework.