26 March, 2013

Moores Law is a computing term which originated around 1970; the simplified version of this law states that processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every two years. This law held true for approxmately 30 years until sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000's resulted in a data deluge that rapidly outpace Moore's law, resulting in data sets that cannot be processed or analysed in a timely manner.

Aisling O' Driscoll, Lecturer Department of Computing and Roy Sleator, Lecturer Department of Biological Sciences have discussed this in a joint review paper DNA published by Landes BioScience. Excerpt as follows:

With world wide data predicted to exceed 40 trillion gigabytes by 2020, big data storage is a very real and escalating problem. Herein, we discuss the utility of synthetic DNA as a robust and eco-friendly archival data storage solution of the future.

Synthetic DNA: The next generation of big data storage.

This paper was also recently reviewed by Datanami.