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by miohtama 776 days ago
In “faster than memcpy” series we have also Blosch for modern CPUs

https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/

I have never been able to use Blosch myself. But it sounds really interesting, outperforming RAM. Not sure what are the applications - columnar data processing, Parquet files, etc?

2 comments

It gets used a fair amount in the weather data space. Forecasting and climate reanalysis grids are typically large (gigabytes) N-dimensional arrays of float32 values and Blosc provides enough tunable knobs that it's fairly easy to find a combination that performs acceptably without writing a bunch of custom handling code to keep track of which underlying compression schemes and settings were used. Additionally, it supports byte- and bit-shuffling filters which can really help boost the compressibility of certain data sets.
Why doesn't BLOSC have a little chart comparing itself to LZ4, Zstd, etc? Kinda like this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37614410/comparison-betw...

Because it seems like such a trivial chart to make.