Samsung recently collaborated with University of Vienna for a breakthrough mobile app called Power Sleep. Power Sleep lets people donate small bits of their mobile CPU power, so that a large supercloud computer can use that power for a scientific research on curing diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s. You don’t need to do much to activate the app; just set an alarm clock before you go to sleep then it is activated. While you are asleep, the smartphone “works” for a good cause by contributing its unused processing power to scientific research. Small packets of data, no more than 1 megabyte in size – smaller, in fact, than a conventional MP3 file – are sent out from the research lab servers and returned again after the mobile devices have performed their calculations.
There is no need to worry about any personal data or identity thefts. Power Sleep does not access personal data of any kind. What comes back into the servers, as a result of the calculation process of the individual devices, are only numerical values relating to protein calculations. It is very important to University of Vienna that the process is transparent, based on a true open-source collaborative platform.
Based on the BOINC platform, which was originally developed to manage SETI@home project, University of Vienna’s SIMAP project then builds a collective database of small calculation series from participants all over the world, in turn providing an open-sourced protein-calculation database to the scientific community for further research on cure for diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. Power Sleep is available in the Samsung App Store and the Google Playstore for Android devices from version 2.3. The app was launched in Austria on the 15th of February.
