On the Use of Social Networking Groups for Automatic Configuration of Virtual Grid Environments

Social networking sites have enhanced the Web by providing online "communities" where users can easily create identities, establish relationships between identities, and share resources with one another across the Web. The availability of social networking APIs, such as OpenSocial or the Facebook platform, make it possible for third-party developers to tap into these social relationships and design socially-aware applications. In this paper, we describe how social networking groups can be used to help create virtual private computing clusters that consist of nodes spanning different administrative domains and organizations. To demonstrate the feasibility and usage of our approach, we developed a fully functional prototype implementation and present the quantitative results of our virtual private network. Our design integrates virtual machines, peer-to-peer virtual private networks, and the Facebook platform API, to enable a user community in which we can easily deploy ad-hoc Condor resource pools that are managed through the Web-based Facebook group interface.