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.
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