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HTC Power To Give initiative aimed at helping find cure for AIDS, Alzheimer's

HTC Power To Give initiative aimed at helping find cure for AIDS, Alzheimer's

By Rohan Swamy | Updated: 13 March 2014 12:36 IST

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Taiwan-based mobile device manufacturer HTC has come up with a new initiative: Power To Give (PTG). Under this, the company plans to make use of a part of the processing power of cellphones to power research projects across the globe. The ideology is based on connecting smartphones on a secure computing grid and use the collective power as a whole to power projects in the field of science, astronomy, bio-medicine and physics.

On the official HTC blog, Social Community Manager, Laura Kimball, writes "With HTC Power to Give you can change the world with your smartphone as you sleep. One needs to download the app from the Google Play store."

Kimball adds that once the smartphone is connected to a charger when a user goes to bed, PTG begins to operate after the phone has charged up to 85 percent. The phone is then said to join an enormous secure computing grid, donating a small proportion of its unused processing power. This grid in turn powers research projects by compiling and aggregating scientific research data needed to solve the problems.

Kimball further mentions in another blog entry that HTC has 'teamed up' with Dr. David Anderson, one of the founders and leaders of volunteer computing initiatives for PCs, to develop a volunteer computing platform for Android smartphones based on the BOINC PC platform, a project at University of California-Berkeley. BOINC, middleware platform, is used by research organisations that conduct crucial research.

According to HTC even if one million smartphones connect to PTG, they would provide one petaflop of processing power, which as blog the mentions, would qualify as the 31st most powerful supercomputer in the world. HTC claims the power generated might just help find cures for diseases like AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer, or generate solutions for providing clean water for people without an access to it.

Of course the HTC Power To Give initiative is not the first of its kind, but probably the first by a major smartphone manufacturer. Other distributed processing networks aimed at solving complex problems or crunching massive numbers exist, such as Folding@Home and SETI@Home, and have in the past leveraged the processing power of smartphones as well.

The HTC Power To Give app is available as a free download for select devices that run Android version 4.3 or later. It can be downloaded from the Google Play store. A list of devices currently supported by the HTC Power To Give app include supporting HTC One, HTC One max, HTC One mini, HTC Butterfly, HTC Butterfly s, Droid DNA by HTC, Google Nexus 5, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, Samsung Galaxy S4 mini, Sony Xperia Z, Sony Xperia Z1, Sony Xperia Z1 Compact, Motorola Moto X, Motorola Moto G, Droid Maxx by Motorola, LG G2 and Lenovo K910.

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