Torrent is a great way to transfer large files very quickly. However most torrent clients are gui based and have quite some impact on system resources (e.g. Azureus). rTorrent is a lightweight client running from the terminal. Being able to run it in a screen session (also upon boot) makes it ideal to also control it from a remote location.

http://www.howtoforge.com/compile_rtorrent_from_svn_ubuntu