Project Bayanihan at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science aims to explore and develop the idea of volunteer computing, which enables people to join a large parallel computation by simply visiting a Web site with an appropriate browser. Because volunteering requires no prior human contact and very little technical knowledge, it becomes very easy to build very large computing networks. This creates exciting new possibilities. With true volunteer systems, one can reach new heights in performance by using many thousands of anonymous volunteer nodes around the world. On a smaller but more practical scale, companies or institutions can use private "forced" volunteer systems to pool together their internal computing resources with minimal administration costs.