It’s been just over two years since the Vodafone Foundation announced they were partnering with Garvan Institute of Medical Research to help fight cancer, today iOS users get their opportunity to start fighting cancer with Dreamlab now available in the iOS app store.
Medical research often requires computing power, a LOT of computing power which doesn’t come cheap. Dreamlab uses a distributed computing model to process datasets provided by the Garvan Institute on your, and everyone elses phone. The plan is that a lot of lower powered mobile processors will equate to the world’s first distributed smartphone supercomputer for cancer research.
Once installed, the Dreamlab app activates when your phone is charging, specifically when you’re finished charging to 100% essentially utilising that time overnight when you’re asleep and the phone is unused. There’s a lot of CPU cycles that are wasted at this time, so why not let your phone be useful?
Professor David Thomas, Head of the Cancer Division at the Garvan Institute said DreamLab is helping in the fight against cancer.
DreamLab is helping us tackle the huge amount of data that we’re producing by sequencing or ‘decoding’ the DNA of cancer patients. Cancer is a disease of the DNA, so by crunching and analysing this data, we hope to understand more about cancer, how to detect, diagnose and treat it better.
150,000 Android users have so far used DreamLab to process data sets pertaining to breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancer, as well as Project Genetic Profile which seeks to understand lung, melanoma, sarcoma and brain cancer. With iOS users on board the pace of research is set to increase.
As a way to promote DreamLab, the Vodafone Foundation has engaged with Celebrities, politicians and CEOs to ’embrace the app as their ‘DreamJob’’. Vodafone wants you to do this as well, from today people using Dreamlab are being encouraged to change their LinkedIn job title to ‘Cancer Researcher at DreamLab App’ as a way to promote usage of Dreamlab.
Joining in the DreamJob promotion or jumping into researching cancer with Dreamlab is easy, you can check it out at ourdreamjob.com.au or just simply download it from Google Play, or the iOS app store.
We’ve been using Dreamlab for a long time now, and we’re still asking Vodafone to gamify it to compete with your friends, but even as a single entity you should install Dreamlab and get researching.
Leaving this running on a phone overnight, any downsides? Does having your CPU running at 100% over the years have any negative impact on the phone?
Been doing it for 2 years on my Nexus 6P, no issues for me.