Social Networks for Cycle-Sharing

Abstract—The growth of the Internet, and consequently the number of interconnected computers is the basis for the global distributed computing and public-resource sharing. Meaning that, these resources have been used for computation intensive projects that could not be completed in a short time frame, sometimes not even in supercomputers which are not widely available. Furthermore, the Internet is overwhelmed by social connec-tivity. Internet users make use of Social networks to interact and share information, knowledge and services with each other. This paper presents an overview of Peer-to-Peer networks and Grids, to understand their advantages and problems. So that, we can grasp the fundamental ideas that sprout the global distributed computing and the problem of locating resources and services efficiently. We also analyze Social networks and social interactions to understand how they can be explored for other uses rather than what they were initially created for. In the last sections we explain the development and resulting evaluation of a web-enabled platform, called Social Networks for Cycle-Sharing (SNCS), that uses Social networks as a starting point for resource and service discovery and integrating it with the Ginger Middleware for distributed computing of tasks. Also, to conclude that using a Social network for public-resource sharing can give common users the possibility of releasing resources for other programs usage. Index Terms—Social networks, resource discovery, distributed systems, Peer-to-Peer, Grids, public-resource sharing, global dis-tributed computing. I