SDC2021: DNA storage with ADS Codex: the Adaptive Codec for Organic Molecular Archives

The information explosion is making the storage industry look to new media to meet increasing demands. Molecular storage, and specifically synthetic DNA, is a rapidly evolving technology that provides high levels of physical data density and longevity for archival storage systems. Major challenges to the adoption are the higher error rates for synthesis and sequencing, as well as the different nature of errors. Unlike traditional storage media, erroneous insertions and deletions are a common source of errors in DNA-based storage sys- tems. These errors require a different approach to encoding and recovery of binary data. Further, the quickly evolving fields of synthesis and sequencing require a codec that can accommodate rapid technology changes in parallelism, er- ror rates, and DNA lengths while allowing the writing and reading technologies to be mixed and matched to best effect. Here we describe ACOMA, an open source end-to-end codec, that has been demonstrated to achieve 0.99 bits of data per nucleotide while successfully recovering data across a variety of real industrial DNA processes for writing and reading data.

Learning Objectives
Advantages of storing data in DNA
Unique challenges of using DNA as media
Describe the design and experiments with our codec

Presented by
Latchesar Ionkov
Los Alamos National Laboratory
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