Trans-social networks for distributed processing

Abstract

A natural succeeding process for the Internet was to create Social Networks (e.g. Facebook, among others), where anyone in the World can share their experiences, knowledge and information, using personal computers or mobile devices. In fact, Social Networks can be regarded as enabling information sharing in a peer-to-peer fashion. Given the enormous number of users, sharing could also be applied to the untapped potential of computing resources in users' computers. By mining the user friendship graphs, we can perform people (and resource) discovery for distributed computing. Actually, employing Social Networks for distributed processing can have significant impact in global distributed computing, by letting users willingly share their idle computing resources publicly with other trusted users, or groups; this sharing extends to activities and causes that users naturally tend to adhere to. We describe the design, development and resulting evaluation of a web-enabled platform, called Trans-SocialDP: Trans-Social Networks for Distributed Processing. This platform can leverage Social Networks to perform resource discovery, mining friendship relationships for computing resources, and giving the possibility of resource (not only information) sharing among users, enabling cycle-sharing (such as in SETI@home) over these networks. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.