While you sleep, your smartphone could be doing something much more useful than acting as your alarm clock.

DreamLab, a three-year collaboration between Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Vodafone Foundation, wants to use your idle smartphone to help cure cancer.

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To participate, all you have to do is download the free Android app from the Google Play Store and make sure your phone is being charged. Choose the types of cancer research you want to support, whether breast, prostate, ovarian or pancreatic, nominate how much mobile network or Wi-Fi data you'd like to donate, and each night, your phone will solve small problems that contribute to big picture research at the Garvan Institute.

If the nation pools its thousands of Androids, the free processing power could essentially create a supercomputer to help researchers crunch the numbers. In a release emailed to Mashable Australia, the Institute said with 100,000 DreamLab apps working on smartphones, the team would be able to process data about 3,000 times faster than they are currently able, and with 5 million users, that rate would increase to 150,000 times.

"As a nation who loves their smartphones, we now have a tremendous opportunity to put them to good use and help find a cure for cancer. Together, we can come to a greater understanding of how to treat it more swiftly," Dr. Samantha Oakes, head of the breast cancer unit at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, said in the statement. "With the help of game-changing innovations like DreamLab, I am hopeful that we will see cures of certain types of cancer in our lifetime."

Kim Dotcom, the erstwhile creator of file hosting service MegaUpload.com, has also proposed using the processing power of idle smartphones for his coming alternative Internet project, MegaNet. At an event in Sydney on Oct. 29, Dotcom claimed if 100 million smartphones installed the MegaNet app, it would have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined.