  The recent super-exponential growth in the amount of sequencing data
generated worldwide has put techniques for compressed storage into the focus.
Most available solutions, however, are strictly tied to specific bioinformatics
formats, sometimes inheriting from them suboptimal design choices; this hinders
flexible and effective data sharing. Here we present CARGO (Compressed
ARchiving for GenOmics), a high-level framework to automatically generate
software systems optimized for the compressed storage of arbitrary types of
large genomic data collections. Straightforward applications of our approach to
FASTQ and SAM archives require a few lines of code, produce solutions that
match and sometimes outperform specialized format-tailored compressors, and
scale well to multi-TB datasets.
