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There have been a number of distributed computing projects over the years, from SETI@Home to Folding@Home (for which KitGuru has a powerful, active team still running) but as much as the desktops of the world are more powerful than ever before, smartphones have seen the biggest explosion of performance hardware in recent years. So it makes total sense that there are projects out there that you can join in with and utilise those spare processor cycles for something good.
Take the cause of DreamLab, which has just launched a new distributed computing smartphone application in partnership with Vodafone Australia, to help speed up cancer research using your smartphone's processor during its downtime. At night, when your phone is charging, once it hits 100 per cent battery the application runs some calculations for the Garvan medical research Institute. According to its quick demo video, just 1,000 app users can speed up data crunching by as much as 30 times. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7pU8XOqORs']
I think we can contribute at least that many from KitGuru readers alone don't you?
To take part, all you need is the Android application which is available at the Google Play Store. Once installed, you can even choose the types of cancers that you want to use your phone to help. Whether it's breast, ovarian, pancreatic or all of them, it all helps speed up the calculations that the institutes's 650+ scientists need to run in order to further test potential treatments for various cancers.
While perhaps the most high profile attempt to harness the power of the world's smartphones though, DreamLab is just one potential use for the power of consumer grade smartphones. Another was recently proposed by internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, who suggested that a version of the internet, known as the MegaNet, could be hosted and distributed via the world's smartphones, allowing for an oversight-free space to communicate in (as per Mashable).
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KitGuru Says: There is a lot of potential in distributed computing. If you have a few spare minutes, give the above application a spin and check out the KitGuru Folding team, they're always looking for new members.
What a complete waste of time ! Not only will you more than half your smartphone’s normal (cr*p) battery life, but a cure for cancer would never be let out of the labs because the drugs companies make way too much money producing the junk that just gets you through the day. If they produced a cure most of the drugs companies would go under within a year or two.
@kitguru.net could there not be a pc version of this? is there a pc version of this?
“Unused Cycles.” What audacity the passionate members of the compute community have judging other people’s systems for their uses?
Part of it is that all the protein folding goes to a research lab at some university or government facility for the purposes of writing a report or journal, not a profit-oriented company in charge of actually making a cure or treatment. That company will have their own supercomputers so they can patent their procedures, can’t do that when it is open-source. The point of their existence is to make money, nothing to do with greed, really. Nothing to take personal, it is just business.
But a University or government lab cannot patent or sell, thus they don’t create cures with the results they get. Those that participate in Folding@Home are wasting their own electricity on the hope they can save a family member. No, I’m sorry, but that person is still going to die, there is nothing they can do about it short of actually getting hired at major pharmaceuticals and making a real impact.
Ironically, those doing research at universities that go onto government labs are probably trying to get into major pharmaceuticals. It is still a community effort that we fold to prove their theories in order for larger companies to see value in hiring them. If someone wants to see it like that, betting on someone else’s chance to save their family member with terminal cancer, that’s their call.
But the idea of “wasted cycles” to me is arrogant and none of anyone’s business.
You are absolutely right. The people wasting their power bills are just helping a PhD or MSc research student get hired into the best firms after they’ve done some worthwhile publications on it. This is the simple truth about it all. The same goes for SETI. Brookings institute’s paper (read authoritative advice to govt) pretty much set it in stone that any type of ET presence be kept away from public knowledge for the sake of geopolitical tactical reasons not to mention theological impact it will produce in an undesirable manner for those in power.
Once I realized this a couple of years ago when I was venturing into my first academic level publications for my masters I removed SETI and folding@home from my system and even the labs I once convinced through the Network admins to runs these applications.
I can understand why many would still ignore your post and mine because it gives them a nice warm feeling that they are somehow helping out but really they would do more help if they did something that directly impacted people’s lives like community service, helping the homeless build shelters, helping out at an orphanage, taking part of disaster relief efforts, raising awareness about the harms of putting plastic utensils into microwaves and so and so forth. If they have it in them, go to university and actually involve in research that uses real time chemical analysis with less dependence on these simulation tools so that any real cure can be quickly publicized to the word, getting it commercialized through a firm is another story entirely though for obvious reasons.