DreamLabs’ vastly distributed processing as an Enterprise Use Case
Conclusion: Vodafone Foundation’s DreamLab1 charity has shown in its work with The Garvan Institute for Medical Research how a huge and diverse collection of the public’s volunteered processing on their smartphones can be used in aggregate to solve complex cancer research problems2.
The use of Mobile and Cloud as the first choice for ICT infrastructure and applications has not been an intuitive choice for most enterprises but the supporting evidence for its value has built rapidly as seen in DreamLab. This case shows the power of using intensely popular smartphones to aggregate processing to solve supercomputer-scale problems.
It also shows that an enterprise Data Centre is not the only place to perform large-scale processing. A combination of vastly distributed third party computing managed by public Cloud is reversing the business risks currently accepted when an enterprise deploys its own ICT infrastructure and places significant risk with the Cloud provider.
Similar applications of this Use Case include other charitable donations of processing capacity; shared processing in channel-focused businesses; supporters aiding not-for-profit organisations; or those that collaborate intensely; or Internet of Things (IoT) scale micro-processing of Big Data scale information across vast numbers of devices.
