Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

Definition and purpose of permacomputing: http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html

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The size of the human genome (feddit.de)

submitted 10 months ago by gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de to c/permacomputing

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Short reminder:

The human genome, with all its magic, is about 3,117,275,501 base pairs long. Source: Wikipedia

If you would encode that data digitally, and store it on a SSD drive, it would take up < 1 GB.

So, if we can do so much magic with 1 GB, that should be an inspiration to all software to do more, with less space.

Thank you for coming to my talk.

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but nobody's gonna encode all of humanity's genes at once. It's like taking the storage of all game sava data of all users combined. It doesn't make sense.

Normally, you look at the storage space for one individual at a time.

[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is an entire research field about looking at sets of genomes. It's called pangenomics. I think they are at hundreds of thousands of human genomes of available data right now. Ten thousand from a few years ago I know for sure.

Considering multiple genomes is one of the keys to understanding the effects of the different genomic variants on the individual. One can for example look at various chronic diseases and see if there is anything special about the genomes of the sick individuals compared to the healthy ones.

This requires a lot of samples, because just comparing one sick and one healthy individual will bring up a lot of false positive variants, that differ between the individuals, but are not related to the disease.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de 2 points 10 months ago

thanks, I hadn't thought of that.