From OSDI '12:

David Haussler, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Director, Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

Cancer is a complex condition—patients present with thousands of subtypes involving different combinations of DNA mutations. Understanding cancer will require aggregating DNA data from many thousands of cancer genomes, facilitating the statistical power to distinguish patterns in the mutations. The rapidly plummeting cost of DNA sequencing will soon make cancer genome sequencing a widespread clinical practice. To anticipate this, UCSC has built a 5-petabyte database for tumor genomes that will be sequenced through National Cancer Institute projects—the Cancer Genomics Hub—and is tackling the significant computational challenges posed by storing, serving, and interpreting cancer genomics data.