(painting by Joselito E. Barcelona, 1993)

Bayanihan Computing Group

Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines

Worldwide Winner, Microsoft .NET Best Awards XML Web Services Contest, Academic Category

Bayanihan is an old tradition in the Philippines wherein neighbors of a relocating family would help the family move by gathering under their house and carrying it to its new location.Although bayanihan practiced in this form has become rare in today’s modern times, the word bayanihan itself has come to mean any manifestation of the powerful spirit of communal unity that can make seemingly impossible feats possible through the cooperation of many people working towards a common goal.

The Bayanihan Computing Group seeks to bring the bayanihan spirit into the realm of computing by making it possible – and easy – for people to pool together their computing resources into a high-performance computing resource capable of solving computational problems much faster than before. Our work began in 1996 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as “Project Bayanihan”, a doctoral thesis project on the idea of volunteer computing, a new form of computing that makes it possible to form very large global networks of cooperating computers by making it very easy for even ordinary users on the Internet to volunteer their idle computers.Through Project Bayanihan, we produced several unique and new results, including a generic volunteer computing framework using Java, new programming models and interfaces for volunteer computing, and several mechanisms for the new problem of sabotage-tolerance – that is, the problem of producing correct results despite the presence of malicious volunteers submitting bad results. Today, we are continuing our research at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, with Bayanihan Computing .NET, a generic software framework that makes use of the new technology of XML web services to go beyond the idea of volunteer computing to that of grid computing, wherein people can not only pool together their computing resources, but can now also make these pooled resources available to others through very simple programming interfaces called computational web services.  Through the power of web services, Bayanihan Computing .NET not only allows people to even more easily build volunteer computing systems than before, but more importantly, allows them to tap the computing power of these systems from any device – even PDAs and mobile phones.  In this way, Bayanihan Computing .NET has the potential of bringing supercomputing power literally into the hands of ordinary users.

What's New

Research Topics

Grid Computing with XML Web Services (Bayanihan Computing .NET)

Volunteer Computing (Project Bayanihan at MIT)

People

Project Leader

Luis F. G. Sarmenta, Ph.D. (lfgs@admu.edu.ph)

Student Members

Stanley Tan
Sacha Chua
Paul Echevarria
Russell Santos
Joey Mendoza
 
This page can be accessed through http://bayanihancomputing.net/, or http://volunteercomputing.net/, or http://xmlgrid.net/
Keywords: grid computing, web services, grid services, peer-to-peer computing, P2P computing, volunteer computing, distributed computing, parallel computing, metacomputing, fault-tolerance
Page last updated: 7 August 2002