I am also a bioinformatician. How much control would you have over node resources? What happens if a browser goes from idle to active? Also, calling this sequencing isn't accurate - this is alignment as daemonk pointed out.
We compute in browsers using webworkers, which means that every javascript code we sent to a browser is managed in a different thread, without harming the user experience.
Indeed, this is not a sequencing demo, but an alignment demo. Thanks for pointing that out.
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I am a bioinformatician and I regularly align sequences against large databases. I wonder how much faster/cheaper will this be compared to renting out an ec2 instance for a couple of hours and crunching through data.
You are using idle computing time to process the alignment so the costs are much lower. That said, we don't have exact figures to compare with an EC2 solution yet.
In addition, CrowdProcess can be used within an internal network using, for instance, the idle browsers of an institution. That would allow you to run a benchmark in a more controlled environment.