Totally unrelated: oh man. My absolute favorite assignment in undergrad computer science classes involved searching ~50GB of compressed text files containing p

Totally unrelated: oh man. My absolute favorite assignment in undergrad computer science classes involved searching ~50GB of compressed text files containing protein sequences, to see how many times "ATG" or something occurred. It was a ton of fun. Minimum requirements were to get the correct counts. Then it turned in to a competition to see who could make the fastest solution. You had like 8 machines at your disposal, each with the full dataset, to distribute whatever you wanted. I think we did it in 3 languages or so (java, erlang, something else...).