Figure 1. Rapid Growth of Genomic and Sequence Data.

(A) The total number of whole genome sequences for humans has grown at an exponential or super-exponential rate in the past ten years, with an estimated nearly one million genomes to be completed by the end of 2016. (B) The size of sequence data in exabytes (right axis, red) and the total number of bases (left axis, blue) are also increasing at an exponential or super-exponential pace, indicating that a yottabyte of sequence data should be generated by the late 2020s. Exabyte (EB)=1×10¹⁸ bytes = a million terabytes; Yottabyte (YB)=1×10²⁴ bytes = a trillion terabytes