Alexander Perryman, a research teaching specialist at Rutgers University's Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Pathogens, said that the time that researchers could get on a traditional supercomputer would equal only "tens of thousands of hours or hundreds of thousands of CPU [central processing unit] hours."
But with the Worldwide Community Grid, he said, researchers could get the equivalent of 30,000 years of CPU time during the same time frame. "It's a tremendous amount of orders of magnitude more than we could get from a traditional supercomputer," Perryman said.
That amount of power is crucial when researching a disease such as Zika, according to Rutgers associate professor Joel Freundlich, who runs a lab within the Center for Emerging and Re-Emerging Pathogens.
Freundlich said that unlike a disease such as cancer, which has attracted massive amounts of research over decades, the Zika virus until recently has drawn little interest among drug developers.
Getting access to IBM's grid, Freundlich said, "is a massive sort of jump start to the drug discovery effort," helping to weed out the many compounds that aren't likely to address Zika, and identifying what will be relatively few compounds that offer a better chance of fighting it.