In a recently published white paper, AMPLab researchers and colleagues describe how it is now feasible to build a data warehouse containing a million genomes of cancer tumors and outline some of the benefits of doing so.   From the abstract:

“This whitepaper shows that it is now technically possible to reliably store and analyze 1 million genomes and related clinical and pathological data, which would match the demand for 2014. Moreover, thanks to advances in cloud computing, it is surprisingly affordable: multiple estimates agree on a technology cost of about $25 a year per genome.

While the focus is on technology, to be thorough, this whitepaper touches on high-level policy issues as well as low-level details about statistics and the price of computer memory to cover the scope of the issues that a million cancer genome warehouse raises.”