In this case DRUGS is Drugs Repurposing Using Grids of Smartphones, a slightly clumsy acronym. It's a project to work out which drugs are best to treat different cancers. This is part of the DreamLab app that allows you to let projects make use of your phone's processing power whilst it's charging. I heard about this on the Click radio show. It's something like SETI@home and other projects we have run on our PCs over the years. I did a few of those, but decided it was not so good to run my PC at full capacity all the time when I wanted it to run cooler and quieter. These days our phones have pretty powerful, mult-core processors that can do some serious work.
You just install the iPhone or Android app and start it running when you put your phone on charge. For many people this will be overnight. I'm happy that it is not using a lot of power as a regular phone charger cannot deliver more than a few watts. I find my phone does not even get significantly warm when running the app.
Vodaphone UK are sponsoring the project and will exclude it's data use from your allocation if you use their service. I don't, but it will mostly be on wifi and there's an option to allocate an amount of mobile data it can use each month. It doesn't seem to use a huge amount.
I guess the app may cause your phone to charge slower, but it has plenty of time overnight to get to 100%, and your electricity usage will go up a little. Phones are designed to be efficient, so they may actually cost less to run than a PC with equivalent processing power.
There's still a long way to go with this project, so they really need more people to take part. I did previous projects to help with such research and I plan to keep on running this one.
Steem on!
I'll buy guitar picks for Steem Dollars
Get a Wirex Debit Card to spend your crypto.
Get some passive income with Mannabase
If this post is over seven days old you can vote up one of my newer posts to reward me.
Spam comments may be flagged. Beware of the Commentphant!
Nice one @steevc, this is my first time hearing about this one. Do they kind of pay you like what the others do?
You don't get paid. Maybe they should hook up with Steem to reward contributors. I have thought about that.
I think that will be a nice one... it will make much more exciting for people to join and they can also build a community around it.
True, but people will happily do these things for no reward. Not everything has to pay you.
We already give out so much access on our phones why not do it for a good cause.
That is true
Just set it up and running on my old iPhone I’ve got sitting around as a backup. It’s interesting, I have a different project running than you are showing. I wonder if it’s geographical or just smartly divided between users.
It may well be geographical. I think it was running in Australia before the UK
Don't you wish you had spent the time with the SETI project or genome project mining crypto currency instead? :) This is a very cool program. Having just recently been diagnosed with cancer, this touches very close to home. Being able to take part in actively helping others through this disease would be great. Thanks for sharing!
I don't think Bitcoin was even a thing when I got into these projects. I remember hearing of people building some serious systems for projects like this when there wasn't even prizes to be won. We need a bit more altruism