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Obviously, that sort of thing is waaaaaaay out of reach right now. It's partly going to depend on whether there really are a finite number of possible states for a given genome. I think that it will probably turn out that there are, but there's a very simple analogue we can look at right now to give us some idea of what we're up against.

Besides SETI, one of the other distributed computing efforts going on right now is research into protein folding for cancer research - I've been debating whether to drop SETI and donate some cycles to that recently. But the fact that it requires massively parallel distributed computing systems to figure out the potential configurations of comparatively simple proteins - that is, hundreds of thousands or even millions of machine-years - should give us some idea of the absolutely enormous computing power that would be needed to determine all the possible configurations and products of, and effects of modifications to, a given strand of DNA. And then if you understand how natural genomes work, maybe then you can start to think about designing your own genome from scratch.

If it is possible - and I'm guessing that it is, although it's just a guess - it's a long way away. Maybe if I can manage to finally quit smoking, I'll be able to hang around just long enough to see something like that happen, but something makes me doubt it. Who knows, though? Someone we've never heard of could be in a lab somewhere right now, on the verge of the massive breakthrough that gives us the key to it all ;)

I'm of the opinion that if design were possible -- that is, if it were possible to predict the form implied by a genome -- that nature would have found and adopted the planning mechanism. Perhaps it has. Isn't it at least possible that evolution is among the most elegant of all possible designing mechanisms?

I have posted the following idea several times and never received a response:

How is the process of design different from evolution? What do designers do, aside from following rote rules to produce cookey cutter products? What do they do when called upon to produce something entirely new?

I don't know what mechanical engineers, but I know what software engineers do. They grab existing code, steal from others, thrash around with new ideas until some of them work. Then, after they have the new concepts mastered, they sit down and write a design plan, pretending that they followed it.