Social cloud computing, also peer-to-peer social cloud computing, is an area of computer science that generalizes

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

to include the sharing, bartering and renting of computing resources across peers whose owners and operators are verified through a

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

reputation system Reputation systems are programs or algorithms that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites such as eBay, Amazon.com, ...

. It expands cloud computing past the confines of formal commercial data centers operated by cloud providers to include anyone interested in participating within the cloud services

sharing economy In capitalism, the sharing economy is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of resources. It often involves a way of purchasing goods and services that differs from the traditional business model of companies hiring employees to produce ...

. This in turn leads to more options, greater economies of scale, while bearing additional advantages for hosting data and computing services closer to the edge where they may be needed most.

Research

Peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...

(P2P) computing and networking to enable decentralized cloud computing has been an area of research for sometime. Social cloud computing intersects peer-to-peer cloud computing with

social computing Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and tech ...

to verify peer and peer owner reputation thus providing security and quality of service assurances to users. On demand computing environments may be constructed and altered statically or dynamically across peers on the Internet based on their available resources and verified reputation to provide such assurances.

Applications

Social cloud computing has been highlighted as a potential benefit to large-scale computing, video gaming, and media streaming. The tenets of social cloud computing has been most famously employed in the

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...

(BOINC), making the service the largest computing grid in the world. Another service that uses social cloud computing is Subutai. Subutai allows peer-to-peer sharing of computing resources globally or within a select permissioned network.

Challenges

Many challenges arise when moving from a traditional cloud infrastructure, to a social cloud environment.

Availability of computational resources

In the case of traditional cloud computing, availability on demand is essential for many cloud customers. Social Cloud Computing doesn't provide this availability guarantee because in a P2P environment, peers are mobile devices which may enter or leave the P2P network at any time, or PCs which have a primary purpose that can override the P2P computation at any time. The only relatively successful use cases as of recent years are those which do not require real time results, only computation power for a small subset or module of a larger algorithm or data set.

Trust and security

Unlike large scale data centers and company brand image, people may be less likely to trust peers vs. a large company like Google or Amazon. Running some sort of computation with sensitive information would then need to be encrypted properly and the overhead of that encryption may reduce the usefulness of the P2P offloading. When resources are distributed in small pieces to many peers for computations, inherent trust must be placed in the client, regardless of the encryption that may be promised to the client.

Reliability

Similar to availability, reliability of computations must be consistent and uniform. If computations offloaded to the client are continuously interrupted, some mechanism for detecting this must be in place such that the client may know the computation is tainted or needs to be completely re-run. In P2P social computing, reliable expected computation power is difficult to achieve because the speed of the client calculation may depend on how much the client is using the end device. Some ways of overcoming this may be to only allow computations to occur at night, or during specified times the client resources will not be in use.

References

{{Reflist Cloud computing Social software Social media