Decoding the Genome: Serious Infrastructure

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the largest genomics data centers in the world. In "The Hum and the Genome," the Scientist writes about the IT infrastructure needed to handle the avalanche of data that researchers have to analyze. With its 2,000 processors and its 300 terabytes of storage, the data center uses today about 0.75 megawatts (MW) of power at a cost of 140,000 per year (about $170K). But the data center will need more than a petabyte of storage within three years, and its yearly electricity bill will reach 500,000 (more than $600K) for about 1.4 MW, enough to power more than a thousand homes. The original article gets all the facts, but this summary contains all the essential numbers."

Re:Who owns the results?

[Hittite Creosote]

The centre is funded by the Wellcome Trust and the UK's Medical Research Council. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a non-trading, non-profit making registered charity. And they tend to make their results open - these are the people who said that the genome should belong to no one individual or company. In other words, if you want to keep your rights without sacrificing the progress of science - we need more places like the Sanger centre.

Re:Who owns the results?

[Gurdy]

> "it also raises the spectre of a single large company owning all these combinations."

You might be interested to read our data release policy http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Projects/release-policy.sh tml [sanger.ac.uk] which describes how the finished data is made publicly available, to all, no charge.

(I work at the Sanger Centre.)

Dave

Re:Who owns the results?

[dan dan the dna man]

Well the nice thing about the Wellcome Trust is that they are an independent charity and the largest non-corporate non-governmental source of biomedical research funding in the UK.

Maybe you'd like to read their constitution: here [wellcome.ac.uk]

Sure theres a chance that things can get tied up in the hands of companies - but lets look at the human genome project. The best data came out of the academic sector, the private data (held by Celera) didn't turn out to be too profitable after all (or even better quality) and is now in the public domain. I worry about the commercialisation of science as much as the next man, but lets face it, business just doesn't care unless there's a drug to sell at the end. Data is still just data.

Re:Fuck Roland

[frakir]

Mod parent up.

Just have a look on http://www.google.com/search?query=Roland+Piquepai lle&as_sitesearch=slashdot.org/ [google.com] or search slashdot articles on roland piquepaille.

Real whore here is Timothy. I bet he'll post an ad for your site for some change, too.

Re:Genome - the dog chasing its tail?

[J. Random Luser]

To correct the kid's kids, you need to make the correction in the gamete, before the original kid is conceived. Maybe I'm not reading enough lately, but from Huxley to Gattaca, I don't recollect anyone actually trying that method...

Re:Exchange Rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Ways to put the Euro symbol in webpages:

• Hex code 0xA4 (decimal 164) in codepage 8859-15 is what you get when you press AltGr+e. This happens to be the general currency symbol in 8859-1, so it's not a good choice if you can't make sure that the document comes with the correct encoding declaration. ""
• HTML entity € "€"
• Unicode character reference € ""
• Hexadecimal unicode character reference € ""

As you can see, Slashcode filters all but the html entity, so that's your only choice here if you have to have the symbol. Most people simply use EUR.

Re:Research target

[Anonymous Coward]

The human genome is only one of the many genomes being studied at the Institute.

One of the organisms being actively studied at the Sanger Institute is Paramecium falciparum, the organism that causes malaria, and Anopheles gambiae, a mosquito. Study of both of these will hopefully reap huge benefits in the treatment, prevention and perhaps eventually eradication of malaria.

The Pathogen Sequencing Unit that's doing that is also studying other major third world diseases, such as plague.

And much of what we do is developing technology and software tools which other researchers, both commercial and academic, can apply to their various areas of disease, pharmacology and agricultural research

Re:Who owns the results?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the analysis software used is also freely availible as it most of the web display code

http://www.ensembl.org/ [ensembl.org]

another sangerite

Re:Some computers use more power and do less

[jordie]

Good to see you've got your facts straight before you posted.

AMD does not have a CPU running anywhere NEAR 4GHz, you're thinking of Intel.

As far as power consumption..
"Even the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ consumes less power than all single core 90nm Pentium 4 CPUs" - Anandtech

For more information please see this [anandtech.com] and this [anandtech.com]

For less power, better performance use AMD.

We can do either

[cookie_cutter]

Will these kids inheric the original bad gene of their parent?

It depends. If you are doing somatic cell genetic engineering, then you only fix those cells in the patient in which the defect manifests itself, and not the germ-line cells (ie, sperm and eggs), so the 'fix' is not passed on to the next generation. If instead you modify the germ-line cells as well, then the 'fix' is passed on to the next generation.

One of the main reasons for doing the somatic fix rather than the germ-line fix is that we're still pretty damned new to this genetic engineering thingy, so it's probably a good idea to not fuck with the genetic heritage of future generations just to cure a patient today. However, as the science and technology develops, and we gain more experience with it, our self-assuredness in our abilities will likely increase, and we'll think we know what we're doing enough to risk making 'permanant' changes to the germ-line. I put 'permanant' in quotes, because if we make genetic changes one way, we should be able to turn them back if and when we decide they are mistakes.