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by Mathnerd314 2350 days ago
Bittorrent does support partial downloads that request only some files or byte ranges out of a torrent. Some of the torrents are just compressed zip's but for the others you could look at the code / documentation to see which files were relevant before downloading 10GB of data.

I think the abstract is sufficient for searching data; expecting some kind of smart database that can handle all the weird formats science uses is a bit much.

1 comments

There are even torrent clients that export a FUSE VFS so you can use your standard tools.