Social Cloud Presentation at the 3rd Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) Service Summit

1. THE SOCIAL CLOUD
Infrastructure and Services
A ‘Short’ Introduction
Kris Bubendorfer
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
The 3rd Karlsruhe Service Summit 2012

2. SOCIAL NETWORKS
 Are based around pre-existing relationships,
 i.e. your friends and colleagues, friends of friends…
 Many applications now use social networks as a
platform for:
 Authentication e.g. Facebook Connect
 Application Portals e.g. ASPEN and PolarGrid projects
 But social networks offer the potential for more than simple
user authentication or provision of portals.
 Social Networks represent a pre-existing web of trust
inherently interwoven into the social network
 How many of your friends are not trusted in some way?
 Friends can be grouped based on interest and level of trust.
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3. THE SOCIAL CLOUD
 The Social Cloud is a new way of thinking about providing cloud
resources and services.
A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing
relationships established between members of a social network.
 Social networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc.):
 provide considerable infrastructure, including authorisation and
APIs for external apps.
 contain many tools for managing relationships, forming groups and
defining security policies.
 Include basic incentive mechanisms to moderate behaviour.
 This is ‘free’ global infrastructure that we can exploit.
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4. THE SOCIAL CLOUD PARADIGM
 What is different about the social cloud paradigm?
 The social network comes first:
It is not a cloud or collaboration environment extended with a social
network, it is a social network extended with cloud functionality.
 The people and their networks form the basic infrastructure, the
services they access and share are formed around their unique
social graph.
 Individuals contribute their competencies - services that
encapsulate; data, storage, computation, algorithms, etc.
 The users choose how to delegate their contributions between the
groups within which they collaborate
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5. THE SOCIAL CLOUD PARADIGM - cont.
 Users fulfill all roles, from provision of resources, management of
collaborations through to comsumption of services and
computation – access to which is performed with familiar Social
Networking tools.
 In some ways this turns the provision of infrastructure on its head.
Rather than fitting the user to the infrastructure, we build the
infrastructure around the user.
 A social cloud is not crowd sourcing:
 the relationships are usually* symmetric, participants are more-or-less
equals who come together under some commonality of interest to
benefit from sharing.
 there is explicitly a pre-existing and external underlying set of
relationships that connects people within a social cloud (no anonymity).
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6. ADVANTAGES IN USABILITY
Using a social cloud lowers usability barriers:
 The interface and tools are already familiar to non expert
(non CS) users,
 Traditionally difficult authorization and access control take
place transparently for the owner and users.
 no visible certificate management,
 single sign on and
 seamless integration with Social Network functionality.
 Collaborations are light-weight and dynamic, services and
resources can be delegated, removed and accessed using
the social network group structure.
 Users share services for the duration of collaboration.
 A good role for a social cloud is in the early stages of a project
when the costs of dedicated or leased infrastructure would be
prohibitive.
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7. GROUPS IN A SOCIAL CLOUD
 We exploit the analogy between social networking groups and
dynamic virtual organizations.
 Groups like virtual organizations have an intent, membership and
policies that define sharing
 in social networks this relates to photos, media, etc.,
 we extend this in the social cloud to include services such as
compute and storage.
 This forms the basis for a Virtual Collaboration Environment.
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8. THE SOCIAL CLOUD PROJECT
 A collaboration between researchers at:
 Victoria, KIT, Cardiff, Chicago, Berkeley…*
 There are so far three implementations exploring different
aspects of the Social Cloud domain:
 (SaaS) Social Storage cloud (our first implementation),
 (IaaS/PaaS) The Social Cloud for Collaborative Computation.
 (CaaS*) The Social Cloud for public science
 Plus:
 Business models for the social cloud,
 Incentives, economies, gamification to facilitate sharing.
 The project began in 2009, with the first publication in 2010.
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9. SOCIAL STORAGE CLOUD
 SaaS: A Basic Social Cloud Storage Service
 Implemented as a Facebook application.
 Our first experiments with a socially oriented market.
Agreement
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10. COLLABORATION & SOCIAL NETWORKS
 Collaboration is desirable, but
 communication and coordination is hard in practice, and
 face to face meetings tend to occur only sporadically, i.e., at
conferences and workshops.
 Social networks can potentially provide a natural basis for
collaboration, they:
 decrease the effort needed to initiate a new collaborative effort,
by using tools and infrastructure already familiar to and
understood by most people,
 Can facilitate discovery of other scientists working on similar
projects, through relationships, feeds and invitations.
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11. RESEARCHERS & SOCIAL NETWORKS
 But, the social network itself is not a complete
collaboration solution.
 collaborators also often have resources they wish to
share for the duration of a project, and
 These resources may include documents, media, data,
services, compute, storage, and so on.
 Currently this is a difficult process that
 Requires access to unfamiliar tools and systems outside
the social network,
 manual (reciprocal) user account creation etc.
 sharing involves access, rights, accounting and auditing
– that increases the overhead of project management.
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12. RESEARCHERS & SOCIAL NETWORKS
 A Social Cloud is unique in that it is completely open
and adhoc – it is created, controlled and managed by its
users and therefore requires only a lightweight group
management infrastructure.
 Difficult tasks such as authentication, group
management, tools for interaction (feeds, walls, sharing
etc.) are bootstrapped for free from the host social
network.
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13. SOCIAL CLOUD VCE ARCHITECTURE
 An IaaS/PaaS platform constructed dynamically and accessed
via a Facebook application.
 Schedules VMs across a VCE (group/VO)
 Built on top of Nimbus Cloud
 Nimbus handles the VM lifecycle.
 Facebook interface to:
 Group/VCE management.
 Create, join, leave a VCE
 Delegate resources to a VCE
 Monitor your VMs (also with Android)
 Monitor your delegated resources.
 Facebook interface, used for groups, feeds, and other project
personnel coordination.
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14. VM CONTROL INTERFACE
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15. SOCIAL CLOUD VCE ARCHITECTURE
 Application Server (logical):
 The application server hosts a web application built using the
Facebook public API that renders directly inside the Facebook UI,
thereby giving the impression of seamless integration to users.
 The application server is responsible for collecting registered user
data from Facebook through the graph API and providing an
interface to the Social Cloud VCE .
 Within the logical Application Server there is also an Image Store,
Scheduler and Context Broker.
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16. PUBLIC ERESEARCH
 Akaholding BOINC back?
What’s volunteer computing
• Lack of visibilitycancer? AIDS? for Network Computing
 A cure for
Berkeley Open have
BOINC projects Infrastructure
• •• Better entry for newtotal
Barriers million usersinexpensive computation
 Using BOINC for in users
2.3 to cryptographic systems?
• •• Unused resources for and joining projects
Lack~0.5 millionidentifyingworthy causes
of ease in are actively contributing
• • Investigating climate change?
 Making science democratic
Low visibility for new projects – citizen science
• Low is it 5.5of active intelligent life out there?
But levels petaflops potential?
 Searching forits
Giving achieving contribution
 What do they have in common?
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17. FACEBOOK STATISTICS
 On average, people on Facebook install apps more than 20
million times every day
 Every month, more than 500 million people use an app on
Facebook or experience the Facebook Platform on other
websites
 More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with
Facebook
Imagine if…
• Even of Facebook’s user base joinedjoined & contributed to
If 1% 0.1% of Facebook’s user base & contributed actively
actively to these science projects.
these science projects.
• That’s .8million users vs. the current 0.5 million
8 million users vs. the current 0.5 million
• Giving 9 petaflops
90 petaflops (Japan’s K Computer - 10 Petaflops)
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18. A SOCIAL CLOUD FOR PUBLIC ERESEARCH
 Asymmetric rather than symmetric.
 Volunteers donate a computation service to projects.
 Deep natural facebook integration
 Social Channels
 News feed
 Requests
 Notifications
 Incentive mechanisms in 3 roles to address:
 Oprhaned projects (champions)
 Recruitment (social anchors)
 Compute contribution (magnates)
 Plus
 Project selection (interest signatures)
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19. 21
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20. ARCHITECTURE
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21. RESULTS – PROJECT CHAMPIONS
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22. IF SUCCESSFUL THIS PROJECT WILL
 Increase visibility and engagement
 Provide more computational power for researchers
 Bring lesser known projects into the limelight
 Involve the public directly with research they care
about.
 The app will launch in Q1 2012.
 Science benefits. Humanity benefits.
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23. SHARING
 Different contexts require different models, we are
exploring a range of allocation techniques in the
social cloud context:
 Storage – credits
 Compute – shares or slices
 Volunteer – gamification, incentives
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24. SUMMARY
 A new cloud paradigm, the social cloud.
 Leverages existing Social Network infrastructure.
 Users contribute to groups, both with resources and
postings (social media) forming VCEs.
 Open flexible, extensible. Global.
 A social cloud defines a ‘community of interest’.
 Access to resources based on implicit trust.
 Potential for adhoc pay per-use ‘localised’ or micro
social clouds
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