Abstract
BackgroundOur publication of the BitTorious portal [1] demonstrated the ability to create a privatized distributed data warehouse of sufficient magnitude for real-world bioinformatics studies using minimal changes to the standard BitTorrent tracker protocol. In this second phase, we release a new server-side specification to accept anonymous philantropic storage donations by the general public, wherein a small portion of each user’s local disk may be used for archival of scientific data. We have implementated the server-side announcement and control portions of this BitTorrent extension into v3.0.0 of the BitTorious portal, upon which compatible clients may be built.ResultsAutomated test cases for the BitTorious Volunteer extensions have been added to the portal’s v3.0.0 release, supporting validation of the “peer affinity” concept and announcement protocol introduced by this specification. Additionally, a separate reference implementation of affinity calculation has been provided in C++ for informaticians wishing to integrate into libtorrent-based projects.ConclusionsThe BitTorrent “affinity” extensions as provided in the BitTorious portal reference implementation allow data publishers to crowdsource the extreme storage prerequisites for research in “big data” fields. With sufficient awareness and adoption of BitTorious Volunteer-based clients by the general public, the BitTorious portal may be able to provide peta-scale storage resources to the scientific community at relatively insignificant financial cost.
Highlights
Our publication of the BitTorious portal [1] demonstrated the ability to create a privatized distributed data warehouse of sufficient magnitude for real-world bioinformatics studies using minimal changes to the standard BitTorrent tracker protocol
Implementation Building upon the existing role-based, per-user-per-feed security model supported by the BitTorious portal [1], we introduce several new concepts and capabilities in order to support controlled, partial replication
We demonstrate affinity calculation with two reference implementations, both distributed as part of the portal source code
Summary
Our publication of the BitTorious portal [1] demonstrated the ability to create a privatized distributed data warehouse of sufficient magnitude for real-world bioinformatics studies using minimal changes to the standard BitTorrent tracker protocol In this second phase, we release a new server-side specification to accept anonymous philantropic storage donations by the general public, wherein a small portion of each user’s local disk may be used for archival of scientific data. A user donating storage towards a typical WGS project will almost certainly not want to contribute more than a mere fraction of the disk space required for even a single patient study For this reason alone, existing BitTorrent portals oriented toward distribution of scientific data cannot reasonably expect participation from citizen scientists, as there are no
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