The researchers had previously claimed that 100,000 phones working for six hours per night would take three months to perform the same calculations as a standard computer working 24 hours a day for 300 years.

The app uses around 500MB of data per month if it runs for six hours a night. Users can also choose to run the app via Wi-Fi.

A Vodafone spokesman said DreamLab had more than 110,000 downloads of the app in total. The app was developed with the Vodafone Foundation, its charitable arm.

Dr Kirill Veselkov, a researcher at Imperial, said: “We urgently need new treatments to tackle Covid-19. There are existing drugs out there that might work to treat it; and the great thing about repurposing existing drugs is that we already know they are safe and therefore could get them to patients quickly.

“However, we have to do difficult and complicated analyses using artificial intelligence and all of this takes a huge amount of computing power. DreamLab creates a supercomputer that enables us to do this important work in a relatively short timeframe.”

Supercomputers are playing an increasingly important role in research into coronavirus

Earlier this week, scientists at UCL said they would access some of the world's most power supercomputers, as part of a consortium with more than a hundred researchers from across the US and Europe.

The world's fastest, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab in the US and the world number nine, SuperMUC-NG in Germany, are included, which can analyse libraries of drug compounds to identify those capable of binding to the spikes on the surface of coronavirus, which the virus uses to invade cells, so as to prevent it from infecting human cells.

These machines could help by identifying virus proteins or parts of protein that stimulate immunity which could be used to develop a vaccine.