Broad Collaboration Enables Environmental Intelligence Research on Derecho at NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center

Building on its Budget 2021 commitment to launch a seven year $360 million National Quantum Strategy, the Government of Canada recently stood up a public survey website to gather insights on how to implement the plan. The survey covers a comprehensive set of issues including best practices on academic, government and private sector partnerships, talent and workforce challenges and opportunities, mechanisms to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion, adoption of quantum technologies by Canadian entities, and identification of any significant gaps, barriers, or challenges that could hinder Canadian efforts to become a global leader in quantum technologies.

Using biological building blocks in place of traditional materials to assemble computers has been a research topic for many years, but recently the first potential commercial use cases have begun to emerge, centered on storage for large data sets. The DNA Storage Alliance, created to promote a storage ecosystem based on synthesized DNA strands, recently shared their aspirations for the emerging technology that offers significant promise in durability, simplicity, cost, and density over traditional magnetic counterparts. The initial goals of the alliance are to educate the public and raise awareness about DNA-based storage. Further out, the alliance may pursue the creation of specifications and standards, such as encoding, physical interfaces, retention, and file systems, to ensure that DNA-based solutions complement existing storage hierarchies. The alliance notes that expectations for the growth rate of current storage mechanisms cannot keep pace with the rising demand for data storage, particularly where growing data retention and related data mining efforts are driving the need to save increasingly larger data sets for longer periods of time. Such requirements are well suited to DNA-based archive storage characteristics in applications including digital content creation, robotics, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, astronomy, and climate science.