Case Study: Vodafone Foundation Australia achieves scalable, secure mobile supercomputing to accelerate cancer research with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Vodafone Foundation - Customer Case Study

Vodafone Foundation Australia, a charitable arm of Vodafone that funds mobile-technology health projects in partnership with organizations like the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, faced a shortage of computing power for cancer research. To tap billions of idle smartphones as a virtual supercomputer through a volunteer app, the team needed a highly scalable, secure infrastructure that could handle unpredictable user uptake and protect personal data.

Working with b2cloud and AWS, Vodafone built the DreamLab Android app on an AWS architecture using services such as Amazon Cognito, SQS, EC2, S3, DynamoDB, and CloudWatch, isolating the project from Vodafone’s commercial environment so anyone can participate. The cloud-based approach cut costs, avoided costly hardware misestimates, enabled rapid feature improvements, and has driven strong early adoption—about 60,000 downloads with expectations to exceed 100,000—while positioning the project for global rollout and expansion to other research areas.

Vodafone Foundation

Andrew Burnet

Domain Delivery Lead