The company DreamLab says will allow users to "donate" their smartphone's processing power while their owners are sleeping:

"Cancer affects so many of the people we love. But what if you could help by speeding up cancer research, simply by going to bed. Researchers are hindered by limited access to supercomputers. So that’s where you and the DreamLab app come in. It’s a free to purchase app* that uses the processing power of your idle phone to solve a piece of the cancer research puzzle. If just 1,000 people used the app, cancer puzzles would be solved 30 times faster."

http://www.vodafone.com.au/aboutvodafone/vodafoneaustraliafoundation/dreamlab



"When a phone is plugged in and fully charged, it is sent a tiny genetic sequencing task by Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research to solve. When it is completed, the data is sent back to the Garvan Institute, which can use it as part of their research.

Users can select what project they want to contribute to, whether it is breast cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer. According to Vodafone, 1,000 smartphones using the app can speed up research by 30 times.

While the service can use a significant amount of data, users can choose limits of 250MB, 500MB and 1GB to send, with the data free for Vodafone Australia customers, or available to send over WiFi."

References:

Vodafone app turns your smartphone into a powerful cancer research machine - Telegraph http://buff.ly/1iNFvnr
App creates 'smartphone supercomputer' to cure cancer http://buff.ly/1NZgbpD
DreamLab - Android Apps on Google Play http://buff.ly/1kkrhfm