University of California at Berkeley's researchers would team up with the International Business Machines to search for a new method in crowd-sourcing a scientific breakthrough. Billions of smartphones were targeted to be tapped for anything from discovering new stars to finding a cure for AIDS.

To help the team in solving the world's largest problems, Berkely and IBM launched Boinc, a mobile app, last July 22. For the Android platform, a list of projects has been listed for its set of users. They could then choose where they want to donate the processing power of their smartphone.

Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory's research scientist said around 1.5 billion operations could be done by a single smartphone for each second. The figure was between 20% and 25% of the computing power in a modern personal computer.

International Data Corporation, a research firm, said about 919 million smartphones would be shipped worldwide, up by 27% from 2012. By 2017, the shipment volume could reach 1.5 billion units since emerging markets were already abandoning the PCs.