Abstract

Archival storage (sometimes cold storage) refers to data which is rarely accessed. Good examples are the raw footage leading to a final cut of a film, satellite images, sensor information from large scale physical experiments etc. The state of the art is using magnetic tape and recently Archival Disc (similar to blu-ray). The frontrunners for replacing these media are glass and DNA . A single gram of DNA could potentially store 200 Petabytes per gram.

In this talk I’ll review the state of the art in DNA storage, some pros and cons and some of the open questions in the field.

Bio: My name is Omer (like Homer but no “H”). I’m a handyman, though I was told by a Mellanox SVP that “that’s not a good thing to broadcast”. I’m in my 4th year of my Ph.D., having done two internships at MSR working on project Silica. I have an M.Sc. in mathematics and previously worked on interconnect (mainly physical layer) of Ethernet, InfiniBand, DDR4 . I also spent some time working on LIDAR for 3d cameras at Intel.