Samsung has collaborated with researchers from the University of Vienna in creating a new mobile alarm app called Power Sleep that lets you donate unused computing power to scientific research. By using this utility, your mobile’s CPU cycles would be pooled together to create a “supercloud computer” that is accessible to researchers all over the world.Power Sleep is made by Cheil Worldwide in conjunction with the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Vienna for Samsung handsets.
All you have to do is set an alarm while going to sleep. After you’re asleep, the app uses your smartphone’s CPU cycles to compute data, and the finished calculations are then sent out to the research lab’s servers, with file sizes usually under 1 MB.Researchers at the University of Vienna then collate the collective database of small calculation series from participants all over the world. The data is turned into an open-sourced protein-calculation database that can then be used by the scientific community to find a cure for diseases like Alzheimer’s.
This free utility will be available for download starting later today from both Google Play and Samsung’s own store. All Samsung devices running Android 2.3 and higher will be able to run this utility.
Claus Adams, COO of Cheil Austria, said that Power Sleep was designed to make it easier for individuals to collaborate their unused resources. “There was this amazing technology out there, which was unfortunately still unknown to the vast majority of people. We realized that the greatest barrier to usage was, paradoxically, the existing technology’s excessive ‘techi-ness’. So we focused on one question – how do we make it easy for a wider crowd to embrace and participate in a crowd-sourced donation platform?”
As soon as Samsung heard of the initiative, they endorsed it. Samsung has been undertaking similar global initiatives that allow individuals to create innovative products that contribute to peoples’ lives and communities. “At Samsung we believe that technology only begins to have meaning when put in the hands of people. Power Sleep was a great project to support, because we felt it was an initiative that really aligned with the brand’s core belief. Moving forward with programs like Power Sleep, we believe innovation should become the bridge that enables people to utilize technology further – not just for themselves, but also for a greater good,” said Gregor Almassy, CMO of Samsung Electronics Austria.
