We are see many new and different features in the smartphones with each new model. However, one thing is certain that their processors are getting more and more powerful. Unfortunately, most of the times this computational power is not fully utilised, specially when we are in sleep. Hence, the department of Life Sciences at the university of Vienna has collaborated with Samsung to harness this untapped processing power of millions of smartphones for the research purposes. They have developed a new Android app named Power Sleep that enables the smartphone users to contribute the processing power of their Android devices for the cause of scientific research.
The Power Sleep app is quite easy to use, it provides the user with an alarm that is set by the user during his sleep. When the alarm is set, the smartphone is fully charged and connected to internet using Wi-fi connection, the app downloads and processes the data from the Similarity Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP) database. The objective of the research is to decipher the protein sequences that can be consequently used in the research of medical field like biochemistry, genetics, research on cancer and hereditary diseases.
According to Professor Thomas Rattei, at the Bioinformatics department of University Of Vienna, in order to find the prevention and cure of diseases like cancer it is important to discover the makeup of their protein sequences. Which is a very computationally intensive task. Power Sleep even enables the common people to contribute to the advancement of the science by dedicating their processing power for the project.
Power Sleep has also been linked with Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which is a huge network with more than 60,000 PCs in the network. The plan is to use the computational power of all these devices to be used in the research to find the true protein sequences. You can easily find and freely download this app from the Play Store.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93Wc4Tl7sXM[/youtube]