Energy - the Hidden Cost of NGS Analysis

Energy - the Hidden Cost of NGS Analysis

With biology getting data-intensive, the costs of analyzing the data has become larger than the costs of acquiring the data. Although scientists are starting to recognize the significance of bioinformatic analysis, steep energy costs for running the servers is one aspect that is rarely mentioned in academic circles. Lack of transparency regarding power bill is one reason. Typically, the servers at academic institutions are maintained by high- performance computing centers, and the researchers pay for them through a bulk charge called ‘institutional overhead’.

Internet companies are innovators in the respect of running large number of servers, and they came up with many solutions to optimize energy usage. However, there may still be large amount of waste as New York Times explained in their article The Cloud Factories Power, Pollution and the Internet:



To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state governments Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the areas top stationary diesel polluters.

The claims made in the article were not liked by an industry practitioner, who wrote this rebuttal -


Not because the article exposed some secret that everyone thats worked on websites at scale knows and this intrepid reporter was blowing the lid on our quasi-masonic-illuminati conspiracy. Not because there was information in it that was in any way shocking.

The reason I was yelling in my head was that I could see, clear as day, how people who dont know whats involved in running large scale websites would take this article. Just look at the comments section.


And nothing could be further from the truth.

Written by M. //