Vodafone redirects collective smartphone compute into COVID-19 research

Vodafone is hoping to redirect idle compute power from smartphones into COVID-19 research efforts by The Imperial College London.

The telco’s Vodafone Foundation said today that it will “refocus” its DreamLab app “to speed up the discovery of anti-viral properties in existing medicines and anti-viral food molecules to help solve COVID-19”.

DreamLab was launched back in 2015 in partnership with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, harnessing the “processing power of idle smartphones to help fast track cancer research.”

The telco is hoping to encourage as many of Australia’s 20 million smartphone users as possible to download the DreamLab app from either the Apple or Google app stores.

Vodafone claimed the “mobile cloud-based processing approach of DreamLab can drastically reduce the time taken to analyse the huge amount of data” used in research projects.

The project to help support COVID-19 research will be available to DreamLab users in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Romania and the UK from today, “with other countries to follow in coming weeks”, Vodafone added.