Waterford Institute of Technology has won a Technology Ireland Industry Award for its research on digital DNA storage.
The Outstanding Academic Achievement Award was for a project that involves an infrastructure that supports encoding of digital transformation in DNA.
The project, titled ‘Digital DNA Storage Infrastructure of the Future’, has the capability to store the equivalent of 70 billion copies of books into a single gram of DNA.
Funded by Huawei, it has the capability to store the resonant equivalent of 70 billion copies of books into a single gram of DNA, and this technique is set to revolutionize the field of data storage.
Well done to the @WIT_Research teams at @TSSG_WIT and @PMBRC_WIT behind the Digital DNA Storage Infrastructure of the Future project which won Outstanding Academic Achievement Award in the field of Digital Technology at the weekend. https://t.co/IcPTGZo4cO
— Waterford IT (@waterfordit) November 24, 2019
Director of Research at Waterford Institute of Technology's research centre TSSG, Sasitharan Balasubramaniam, says it will lead to a new form of data storage for the future:
"The whole idea of this work is that we're trying to look at new ways of storing data and not actually storing in the conventional discs that you have in the data centres you have today, but other types of medium. A lot of work has been going on in recent years on storing information into DNA. DNA's able to store quite a large amount of information into a very small quantity of DNA strands, and at the very same time they're very durable as well."
He explains why they're looking for new ways to store data:
"The data centres that are used to store a lot of information today, they're becoming stressed out and they require continued expansion. And they're consuming a phenomenal amount of energy, particular energy to cool the data centres, so for that reason we have to look at alternative mediums for us to store this information as well so we can remove some of the stress from the data centres."
