Gamers, bitcoin "miners" and companies large and small have teamed up for an unprecedented data-crunching effort that aims to harness idle computing power to accelerate research for a coronavirus treatment.

The project led by computational biologists has effectively created the world's most powerful supercomputer that can handle trillions of calculations needed to understand the structure of the virus.

More than 400,000 users downloaded the application in the past two weeks from "Folding@Home," according to its director Professor Greg Bowman.

The "distributed computing" effort ties together thousands of devices to create a virtual supercomputer.

The project originally launched at Stanford University 20 years ago was designed to use crowdsourced computing power for simulations to better understand diseases, especially "protein folding" anomalies that can make pathogens deadly.

The massive analysis looks for "pockets" or holes in the virus where a drug can be squeezed in. The powerful computing effort can test potential drug therapies, a technique known as computational drug design.

Bowman said he is optimistic about this effort because the team previously found a "druggable" target in the Ebola virus and because Covid-19 is structurally similar to the SARS virus which has been the subject of many studies.