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Genetic Database Hits One Billion Entries

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the start-the-recount dept.

ChocSnorfler writes to tell us that the Sanger Institute is reporting that their Genetic Record Database has hit one billion entries, making it the world's largest. From the announcement: "The Trace Archive is a store of all the sequence data produced and published by the world scientific community, including the Sanger Institute's own prodigious output as a world-leading genomics institution. To grasp how much data is in the Archive, if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest. The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months."

7 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. For God's sake, don't print it! by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some dumbass is always printing 300 pages of documents and hogging the printer. Forchrissakes, just figure out what pages you need and print those! Asshole.

    The amount of data here is really enormous. To put it in perspective, if you lined up 7143 blondes, the number of strands of hair present would approximately equal the number of entries in this database.

    1. Re:For God's sake, don't print it! by margaret · · Score: 5, Funny

      Some dumbass is always printing 300 pages of documents and hogging the printer. Forchrissakes, just figure out what pages you need and print those! Asshole.

      Like when I was in grad school, I remember our IT guy was hopping mad because he had to come in on a sunday to reboot the server because some dumbass decided to print the entire mouse chromomome 22 sequence. Something about a spool file and crashing his server...

  2. i love meaningless data by JeanBaptiste · · Score: 5, Funny

    "To grasp how much data is in the Archive, if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest. "

    I have twice that much data on my 128k thumbdrive, if printed out in 72 point font size.

    Anyone care to translate this into volkswagens, or libraries of congress?

    1. Re:i love meaningless data by Frogbert · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, but to put it in some perspective. It would take over 6 minutes for a japanese school girl to type it all out on her phone.

    2. Re:i love meaningless data by Brent+Spiner · · Score: 5, Funny

      If you choose a fixed-width font such as 12 point Courier about 75 letters fit on a single line with half inch margins. This means that each letter is about 2.54 millimeters in length. The earth is 24900 miles in circumference that means that it would take 15776640000 letters to stretch around the earth.

      If we take a 1967 Volkswagen to be a measuremeant of length then it is 1606.01 times larger than a single letter so it would take 9823500.48 Volkswagi to tailgate around the earth. Multiply that by 250 and you get ~ 2.455875x10^9 Volkswagens.

      Since it is quite easy to convert Volkswagens to Library of Congresses I won't go into further detail.

      --
      Reality test... am I dreaming?
  3. If printed out... by MarkusQ · · Score: 5, Funny

    if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest

    Did anybody else think "Wow, I've got a great idea for a mural for the space elevator!"

    Anybody?

    Uh, well, it's late...

    --MarkusQ

  4. Torrent? by mendaliv · · Score: 5, Funny

    Would somebody please torrent it?