Matriline lets a research group distribute ORCA calculations among several computers (lab desktops, laptops, the computers of colleagues who want to help). This is especially effective in projects which need to compute hundreds or thousands of inputs.
Many properties of a molecule (its shape, its energy, how it absorbs light, whether a reaction can happen) can be predicted by solving the equations of quantum mechanics on a computer. ORCA is a widely used program that does these calculations, free for academic use. One calculation takes from seconds to days, and a research project often needs hundreds or thousands of them. Research groups without access to a computing cluster run them one after another on a few computers, which can take weeks.
Matriline distributes your projects calculations from one computer, which keeps the list of calculation inputs. Each task is distributed to other computers you register in the project, each one asks the central server for inputs, runs ORCA, sends back the result and asks for the next task.
While matriline only works with orca, most of its functionality can be used in other input-output based pipelines, even serially (one task is executed after the output of another is calculated). The sibling project catenaline is still experimental, but if you want to distribute your workflow you can try it as well!