Jonathan Eisen and his team at the University of California, Davis Genome Center have developed a new website, www.biotorrents.net, that allows rapid file sharing of large sets of scientific data. Using BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer technology, the site shares bandwidth across institutions and splits data sets into smaller pieces, making it possible for multiple users to transfer and search large files quickly. Funding from a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant to UC Davis helped support the BioTorrents project, which is featured in the April 14 issue of PLoS ONE.

Read more:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100421/full/4641108a.html

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/04/improving_the_portability_of_d_1.html
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/bittorrenting-biology-getting-the-big-picture-in-search.ars