Squeezing big data into a small organisation - Open Source Software in Life Science Research - page 256

have seen data costs plummet and yield grow at a rate of change in excess
of that of the famous Moore's Law [1] (Figure 11.1), stretching the
hardware and software we use to its limits. Dealing with these data is a
truly mammoth task and contextualising the amount of data that must be
handled for a new entrant to the fi eld or a scientist with little or no
informatics background is diffi cult; inevitably we end up talking about
abstract quantities like terabytes (TB), which for most people, even
technically minded people like scientists, has little connection to daily

￿ ￿ ￿ ￿ ￿

Changes in bases of sequence stored in GenBank and
the cost of sequencing over the last decade. Series have
been altered to fi t on a single logarithimic scale. Change
of number of nucleotides in GenBank is according to
GenBank Release notes ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genbank/
gbrel.txt . Cost of sequence per MB according to NHGRI
at http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

Figure 11.1