Cost-Reducing Writing DNA Data

In DNA's Niche in the Storage Market, I addressed a hypothetical DNA storage company's engineers and posed this challenge:

increase the speed of synthesis by a factor of a quarter of a trillion, while reducing the cost by a factor of fifty trillion, in less than 10 years while spending no more than $24M/yr.

Now, a company called Catalog plans to demo a significant step in the right direction:

The goal of the demonstration, says Park, is to store 125 gigabytes, ... in 24 hours, on less than 1 cubic centimeter of DNA. And to do it for $7,000.

That would be 1E11 bits for $7E3. At the theoretical maximum 2 bits/base, it would be $3.5E-8 per base, versus last year's estimate of 1E-4, or around 30,000 times better.

If the demo succeeds, it marks a major achievement. But below the fold I continue to throw cold water on the medium-term prospects for DNA storage.

Compression vs. Preservation

An archive is in a hardware refresh cycle and they have asked me to comment on concerns arising because their favored storage hardware uses data compression, which may not be possible to disable even if doing so were a good idea. This is an issue I wrote about two years ago in Threats to stored data.

Because similar concerns keep re-appearing in discussions of digital preservation, I decided this time to discuss it in the same way as Cloud for Preservation, writing a post with a general discussion of the issues without referring to a specific institution. Below the fold, the details.

It's The Enforcement, Stupid!

Kim Stanley Robinson is a remarkable author. In 1990 he concluded his Wild Shore triptych of novels describing alternate futures for California with Pacific Edge:

Pacific Edge (1990) can be compared to Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, and also to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. This book's Californian future is set in the El Modena neighborhood of Orange in 2065. It depicts a realistic utopia as it describes a possible transformation process from our present status, to a more ecologically-focused future.

Why am I writing about this now, nearly three decades later? Follow me below the fold for an explanation.

It Isn't Just Cryptocurrency Mining

Izabella Kaminska's Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's green reports on:

A new report by the carbon emission think-tank The Shift Project out this week highlights that not much has changed since [2014]. ICT still contributes to about 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is still twice that of civil aviation. What is worse, its contribution is growing more quickly than that of civil aviation.

Cryptocurrency mining is definitely a problem, but how big a part of the problem isn't clear. It could be quite big. Follow me below the fold for some surprising details.

Demand Is Far From Insatiable

Based on numbers that IDC conjures from thin air, pundits believe that demand for storage is insatiable because everyone says Lets Just Keep Everything Forever In The Cloud. That idea assumes storage is free, but Storage Will Be Much Less Free Than It Used To Be. (Both links are from 2012). Below the fold I look at some real-world numbers showing how much storage actual customers are buying.

Economic Models Of Long-Term Storage

My work on the economics of long-term storage with students at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Storage Systems stopped about six years ago some time after the funding from the Library of Congress ran out. Last year to help with some work at the Internet Archive I developed a much simplified economic model, which runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Two recent developments provide alternative models:

• Last year, James Byron, Darrell Long, and Ethan Miller's Using Simulation to Design Scalable and Cost-Efficient Archival Storage Systems (also here) reported on a vastly more sophisticated model developed at the Center. It includes both much more detailed historical data about, for example, electricity cost, and covers various media types including tape, optical, and SSDs.
• At the recent PASIG Julian Morley reported on the model being used at the Stanford Digital Repository, a hybrid local and cloud system, and he has made the spreadsheet available for use.

Below the fold some commentary on all three models.

IT Improves Productivity!

In The Productivity Paradox David Rotman writes:

Productivity growth in most of the world’s rich countries has been dismal since around 2004. Especially vexing is the sluggish pace of what economists call total factor productivity—the part that accounts for the contributions of innovation and technology. In a time of Facebook, smartphones, self-driving cars, and computers that can beat a person at just about any board game, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so pathetic? Economists have tagged this the “productivity paradox.”

Some argue that it’s because today’s technologies are not nearly as impressive as we think. The leading proponent of that view, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, contends that compared with breakthroughs like indoor plumbing and the electric motor, today’s advances are small and of limited economic benefit. Others think productivity is in fact increasing but we simply don’t know how to measure things like the value delivered by Google and Facebook, particularly when many of the benefits are “free.”

My view is that IT is only one of the factors driving the decrease of productivity in the general economy, but that there are some areas of the economy in which IT is greatly increasing productivity. An explanation is below the fold.