Experiences in the design and implementation of a Social Cloud for Volunteer Computing

Volunteer computing provides an alternative computing paradigm for establishing the resources required to support large scale scientific computing. The model is particularly well suited for projects that have high popularity and little available computing infrastructure. The premise of volunteer computing platforms is the contribution of computing resources by individuals for little to no gain. It is therefore difficult to attract and retain contributors to projects. The Social Cloud for Volunteer Computing aims to exploit social engineering principles and the ubiquity of social networks to increase the outreach of volunteer computing, by providing an integrated volunteer computing application and creating gamification algorithms based on social principles to encourage contribution. In this paper we present the development of a production SoCVC, detailing the architecture, implementation and performance of the SoCVC Facebook application and show that the approach proposed could have a high impact on volunteer computing projects.