25/02/2014

Gianni de Fabritiis at the launch of "HTC Power to Give", a new mobile based volunteer computing project

As part of the Mobile World Congress, on February 24th, Taiwanese smartphone company HTC launched, before 200 journalists from around the world, the new project HTC Power to Give. The Power to Give application can be downloaded from Android phones allows to harness the processing capacity of smartphones for scientific purposes.

Gianni De Fabritiis, head of the Computational Biophysics group of GRIB (IMIM -UPF), was the only scientist invited to the event and shared stage with the president of HTC, Cher Wang and company CEO Peter Cho.

De Fabritiis participation consisted in explaining volunteer distributed computing and its importance in research. He spoke about his GPUGRID project created 7 years ago in which volunteer distributed computing is used for molecular dynamics simulations in biomedicine. Researchers computationally simulate how certain proteins responsible of diseases such as cancer , HIV etc. interact in order to see their behavior.

According to De Fabritiis "Such simulations require much computing power. In our early days we used the computing power of game consoles, then of graphic cards and now the mobile phones are the future ". HTC opens the door for smartphone owners; voluntary participation in the advancement of science in an easy, no-cost way. Gianni De Fabritiis' group has already developed an application for Power To Give that will soon be available for Android.