title: BitTorious: global controlled genomics data publication, research and archiving via BitTorrent extensions.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Centralized silos of genomic data are architecturally easier to initially design, develop and deploy than distributed models. However, as interoperability pains in EHR/EMR, HIE and other collaboration-centric life sciences domains have taught us, the core challenge of networking genomics systems is not in the construction of individual silos, but the interoperability of those deployments in a manner embracing the heterogeneous needs, terms and infrastructure of collaborating parties. This article demonstrates the adaptation of BitTorrent to private collaboration networks in an authenticated, authorized and encrypted manner while retaining the same characteristics of standard BitTorrent.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The BitTorious portal was sucessfully used to manage many concurrent domestic Bittorrent clients across the United States: exchanging genomics data payloads in excess of 500GiB using the uTorrent client software on Linux, OSX and Windows platforms. Individual nodes were sporadically interrupted to verify the resilience of the system to outages of a single client node as well as recovery of nodes resuming operation on intermittent Internet connections.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The authorization-based extension of Bittorrent and accompanying BitTorious reference tracker and user management web portal provide a free, standards-based, general purpose and extensible data distribution system for large 'omics collaborations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University, 13212 East Shea Boulevard, Scottsdale, AZ, 85259, USA. preston@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Preston V
authors.initials: PV
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Arizona State University, 13212 East Shea Boulevard, Scottsdale, AZ, 85259, USA. valentin.dinu@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Valentin
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Dinu
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D001109:Archives; D035843:Biomedical Research; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011643:Publishing; D012984:Software; D014481:United States