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.
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.
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.