Related, Present, and Future Work

  Project Bayanihan joins a growing number of other projects enabling people to use Java for web-based parallel computing. Most early projects such as ATLAS, ParaWeb, JPVM, and many newer projects such as IceT and others presented or referred to in [1] use Java applications. These are more powerful and versatile than applets, but require some technical expertise and setup effort from volunteer users. Projects like Bayanihan that support the use of applets and Web browsers to allow ``ordinary'' users to volunteer their computers seem to be fewer, but have also been growing in number. These include simple systems such as DAMPP [8], and more complex and general-purpose frameworks such as Charlotte [2], and Javelin [4]. Many of these projects provide the programmer with a way to easily generate different applications, but are usually restricted to following a particular programming model.

Project Bayanihan takes advantage of the flexibility and ease-of-use provided by distributed object technology to build a general-purpose framework for implementing and experimenting not only with different applications, but with different programming models and volunteer computing mechanisms as well. Work remains to be done on implementing more complex programming models, but current results with master-worker style applications demonstrate the framework's future potentials.