  The current COVID-19 global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 betacoronavirus
has resulted in over a million deaths and is having a grave socio-economic
impact, hence there is an urgency to find solutions to key research challenges.
Much of this COVID-19 research depends on distributed computing. In this
article, I review distributed architectures -- various types of clusters, grids
and clouds -- that can be leveraged to perform these tasks at scale, at
high-throughput, with a high degree of parallelism, and which can also be used
to work collaboratively. High-performance computing (HPC) clusters will be used
to carry out much of this work. Several bigdata processing tasks used in
reducing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 require high-throughput approaches, and a
variety of tools, which Hadoop and Spark offer, even using commodity hardware.
Extremely large-scale COVID-19 research has also utilised some of the world's
fastest supercomputers, such as IBM's SUMMIT -- for ensemble docking
high-throughput screening against SARS-CoV-2 targets for drug-repurposing, and
high-throughput gene analysis -- and Sentinel, an XPE-Cray based system used to
explore natural products. Grid computing has facilitated the formation of the
world's first Exascale grid computer. This has accelerated COVID-19 research in
molecular dynamics simulations of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein interactions through
massively-parallel computation and was performed with over 1 million volunteer
computing devices using the Folding@home platform. Grids and clouds both can
also be used for international collaboration by enabling access to important
datasets and providing services that allow researchers to focus on research
rather than on time-consuming data-management tasks.
