• Question: How much information can 1 program store?

    Asked by to Zena on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Zena Hira

      Zena Hira answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Programs do not store information inside them. Information is stored on RAM and it is limited to the RAM your computer has.
      A computer’s memory stores numbers in huge amounts of cells that are addressed and can be quickly accessed by the CPU to perform calculations. There are two main types of computer memory, ROM (read only memory) and RAM (random access memory). ROM contains pre-written software and data that the CPU can only read, while RAM can be accessed and written to at any time. RAM is very fast and that is why we use it for programming.

      If you try to use more than what you have it will crash. My iMac has 16GigaByte which is a lot and also there is 1TerraByte of what is called swap I can use which is also A LOT. 1 TerraByte has 1000 GigaBytes in it.

      However cancer data is quite big and this might not be enough sometimes. So when you write a program you need to find a smart way of putting the data is the program (“reading” the data) and limit the amount of RAM you are using. Other than that analysis also needs a lot of RAM since it performs complex mathematical calculations on the data

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