Catalog Technologies, a DNA-based data storage and computation company, reported today that: ”
The company says the demonstration is the result of CATALOG working with potential customers and partners to understand their use cases. Using its platform and using text as an example, CATALOG was able to demonstrate how chemistry can be leveraged to compute archives in parallel.
In September, CATALOG used a “combinatorial writing scheme” to encode approximately 17,000 words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet into DNA in minutes on Shannon, CATALOG’s flagship writer. Against this DNA archive, CATALOG performed a parallel search computation and successfully retrieved all occurrences of the query word. According to the company, its approach does not require complex pretreatment. “Instead, CATALOG’s approach took advantage of the massive parallelism of chemistry to retrieve all occurrences of query words in a number of steps that were largely independent of the size of the dataset,” the company said.
Then, last month, in a demonstration of scalability, CATALOG encoded about 200,000 words of eight Shakespearean tragedies into its DNA, using roughly the same number of chemical computation steps, time, and resources as in the first case, to produce all eight plays. Successfully retrieved all occurrences of the query word in . Search for Hamlet, according to the company. CATALOG is on track and by mid-2023 he plans to demonstrate this search scalability on a dataset of over 100 million words. CATALOG’s “approach for the first time shows how the massively parallel processing of DNA chemistry can be exploited to retrieve nearly any amount of data stored in DNA without the expected proportional increase in resources.” said the company.
Hyperion Research CEO Earl Joseph said: “DNA-based chemistry is an interesting medium for advancing both storage and compute-related solutions. It demonstrates the ability to execute and demonstrates the advancement of CATALOG’s proprietary technology for creating DNA-based solutions and implementing DNA-based computing.”
In describing its demonstration, CATALOG said that search is a fundamental element of computing. Searching the Internet often returns queries quickly because indexing data is time consuming and costly. However, more than 90% of enterprise data is unstructured, which can be expensive and impossible to search effectively. This can lead to missed insights due to lack of timely search results, which can have a significant long-term impact in many industries such as oil and gas, finance, and government. It becomes a barrier.
According to the company, in recent years the IT industry has seen a proliferation of fit-for-purpose technologies such as GPUs and other accelerators, quantum computers, and extremely parallel computers.
However, this performance and scale comes at the cost of higher energy consumption, greater memory and long-term storage requirements, and higher management complexity. This has generated tremendous interest and momentum in chemical-based DNA computing systems that have a much smaller physical footprint, consume orders of magnitude less energy, and are immune to traditional electronic security vulnerabilities. .
While much of research and academia is developing approaches to using DNA as a storage platform for archival purposes, CATALOG says its unique approach of encoding data into DNA allows key insights to be derived from data stored in DNA. It is uniquely positioned for large-scale computing to obtain Many researchers and labs testing DNA-based storage focus on storing information densely within DNA molecules. CATALOG overturns this idea, storing information in a specific her collection of DNA molecules. Unlike other approaches, this gives his CATALOG degrees of freedom in designing optimal DNA sequences for computation, making writing orders of magnitude more efficient.
In addition to proving DNA computing power, CATALOG also demonstrated with this achievement that powerful computing power can greatly improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of reading data from DNA.
Dr. Hyunjun Park, Founder and CEO of CATALOG, said: “Having demonstrated the benefits of DNA-based data storage and computation, we are now turning our attention to addressing more sophisticated applications, from signal processing to machine learning on large datasets. In parallel, we are working closely with our partners and collaborators to reduce the size and complexity of the platform and identify specific workloads targeted for commercial offerings.”
CATALOG said it is accelerating its vision of DNA computing by advancing DNA computing algorithms and applications that have commercial potential in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and secure computing. I was. In addition, CATALOG develops solutions for DNA-based information security, rack- and desk-size DNA data storage and computing platforms, DNA data storage as a service, and DNA data storage and computing APIs.