How researchers can borrow your cellphone while you’re asleep to fight AIDS

While you’re fast asleep, you’re mobile phone is lying on the charger with a lot of spare time on its hands. Now you can put your phone to work for a good cause when you’re not using it.

With the rapid rise of mobile computing, researchers find that smartphones and tablets are just as powerful as your average desktop computer and they’re taking advantage of that.

An Android app now allows users to lend their device’s computer processing skills to create a supercomputer for researchers to test on. The crowdsourcing app called “Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing” (BOINC) was released last month in the Google Play app store.

Just download the free BOINC app from the Google Play site and choose the projects you would like to support. Then researchers can harness the unused computing power and run jobs for their projects.

Downloading the app helps scientists save money and time by allowing them to use your phone for experiments that can help find new drugs to treat AIDS.

 
This app helps researchers find cures for diseases. (Image via BOINC)

To lend your phone for research, it needs to be hooked up to Wi-Fi so researchers can transfer data without going over your plan’s limit and it should be fully charged and plugged into an outlet so it doesn’t use your battery life.

Since its launch in July, the app has been downloaded 30,000 times. 

Mobile volunteer computing

This kind of volunteer computing isn’t new — scientists have already gotten familiar with tapping into a pool of donated computer processing power to conduct their simulations and data analysis, but they’ve been using traditional computers like desktops and laptops to do it.

Researchers from IBM’s World Community Grid, a technology solution-based organization are on a mission to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle humanity projects are helping along their search for medical cures with apps like these.

Other projects your phone can help with:

Einstein@Home: Your phone can assist researchers in the search for radio pulsars by detecting their pulsed electromagnetic wave emission.

Computing for Clean Water: This project uses large-scale molecular dynamics calculations — where the motions of individual water molecules through the nanotubes are simulated — in order to get a deeper understanding of the mechanism of water flow in the nanotubes.

To participate, download the app or learn more about the project.