BOINC and folding@home are similar in how they work in that they are both volunteer computing platforms. Folding@home is closed source, proprietary, run by a single research group, BOINC is open source and used by many different research groups working on various topics from health to astrophysics.

The idea here is to build a BOINC server where researchers can submit work to the server and get results without having to run their own BOINC server in the process.

Bioinformatics

This is an excellent field for our proof of concept, just looking for a specific app to start with.

Is that data compressible? A few GB for an input or output file isn't entirely unmanageable from our perspective. Not ideal, but workable. What are some popular OSS tools used in your field?