HORIZON: A Read-Efficient Firmware for DNA Storage with Horizontal Layout
2026-08-25 • Emerging Technologies
Emerging Technologies
AI summaryⓘ
The authors focus on improving how data is read from DNA storage, which is a method to save information for a long time. Traditional methods mix frequently and rarely used data together, causing extra work when reading small amounts of information. Their solution, HORIZON, spreads out data evenly and tracks recent use to make reading more efficient. Tests show HORIZON reduces unnecessary reading steps compared to previous methods.
DNA storagerandom accessread amplificationprimer pairshorizontal layoutwrite bufferdata allocationsliding-window temperature model
Authors
Alex Sensintaffar, Roop Kiran, Yang Chen, Mai Zheng, Bingzhe Li
Abstract
DNA storage is a promising medium for long-term archiving, but its read performance is limited by coarse-grained random access. Existing random-access DNA storage designs suffer from high read amplification because their sequential layouts co-locate frequently and infrequently accessed data under the same primer pair, where any read must retrieve all associated strands even when only a small fraction is needed. We present HORIZON, a read-efficient allocation policy for DNA block devices that reduces read amplification through activity-aware horizontal placement. HORIZON first introduces a horizontal layout distributing writes round-robin across primer pairs, rather than filling each sequentially. It classifies newly written blocks in the write buffer as active or inactive, tracks recent primer-pair accesses using a sliding-window temperature model, and allocates blocks based on block activity and primer-pair occupancy. Simulations show HORIZON consistently reduces read amplification compared with state-of-the-art schemes across MSR and FIU traces and synthetic filesystem workloads.