I'm wondering if torrents as such are actually useful for this. I'd figure some kind of virtual file system (perhaps based on BitTorrent) would be very useful. You'd simply pass a file path to an open() routine in your scientific code and data would get opened transparently. You currently have this with URLs and HTTP but there's no useful caching or data distribution.
If you have the torrent file, you can use one of the things that mount them as virtual file systems, like btfs (https://github.com/johang/btfs).