By Sara Castellanos

A consortium of US government agencies and technology companies is granting free supercomputing resources to research teams that aim to quickly find drugs to combat Covid-19 and forecast its spread.

The teams are working with computing power from some of the world’s fastest supercomputers as part of the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a partnership announced last month that includes the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, International Business Machines Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud, Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services and others.

Among the teams is a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developing a way to thwart the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 by creating a “decoy” receptor, or protein, that could be taken as a medicine.