In these post-genomic days, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, home of GenBank and PubMed, receives about 170,000 unique visitors per month. Barbara Rapp of NCBI’s information resources branch in Bethesda shared the center’s current stats with Genome Technology:
Number of base pairs contained in GenBank as of October 2000: 10,335,692,655
Number of sequences: 9,102,634
Approximate average number of base pairs deposited to GenBank per day in 2000: 28 million
Total number of base pairs contained in GenBank in 1988: 24 million
Approximate average number of sequences deposited to GenBank per day in 2000: 25,000
Total number of sequences contained in GenBank in 1988: 20,579
Amount of disk space required to hold all sequence files in GenBank: 36,464 MB
Users that download GenBank by FTP daily: 450
Unique users of NCBI molecular biology services in October 2000: about 35,000
Number in October 1999: about 25,000
BLAST sequence similarity searches per day in October 2000: 90,000 to 100,000
Number per day in October 1999: 50,000
Text searches per day of the Entrez DNA and protein sequence databases in October 2000: 180,000
Same searches per day in October 1999: 150,000
Speed of NCBI’s internet connection: 45 Mbps via T3
Computers supporting PubMed, GenBank, and other molecular biology databases:
Two 2-cpu SGI Origin 200 computers;
Three 4-cpu Sun Enterprise 420R servers;
Three 8-cpu Sun Enterprise 4500 servers;
Four 4-cpu Sun Enterprise 450 servers.
Supporting public BLAST sequence comparisons:
Eleven 4-cpu Intel-based Dell servers
Five 8-cpu Intel-based Dell servers
Three 20-cpu SGI Challenge XL
One 12-cpu Sun Enterprise 4000
Additional support for GenBank and other molecular biology database production:
Combination of eight Sun Enterprise 420R, Enterprise 4000, and Enterprise 5500 systems.
NCBI’s fiscal year 2000 budget: $34 million