============================== Announcing Blosc 1.0 (final) ==============================
:Author: Francesc Alted i Abad :Contact: [email protected] :URL: http://blosc.pytables.org What is new? ============ Everything :-) This is the first public release of a project that started more than a year ago and that, after very intensive testing (several hundreds of TB compressed and decompressed without a glitch), it is finally ready for public consumption. So, I'm proud to announce the availability of Blosc 1.0 (final) release. It has been declared stable for production purposes, and I hope it will serve well those of you needing a high-performance compressor. What is it? =========== Blosc [1]_ is a high performance compressor optimized for binary data. It has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach via a memcpy() OS call. Blosc is the first compressor (that I'm aware of) that is meant not only to reduce the size of large datasets on-disk or in-memory, but also to accelerate memory-bound computations. It uses the blocking technique (as described in [2]_) to reduce activity on the memory bus as much as possible. In short, this technique works by dividing datasets in blocks that are small enough to fit in caches of modern processors and perform compression / decompression there. It also leverages, if available, SIMD instructions (SSE2) and multi-threading capabilities of CPUs, in order to accelerate the compression / decompression process to a maximum. You can see some recent benchmarks about Blosc performance in [3]_, and in combination with PyTables in [4]_, [5]_ and [6]_. .. [1] http://blosc.pytables.org .. [2] http://www.pytables.org/docs/CISE-12-2-ScientificPro.pdf .. [3] http://blosc.pytables.org/trac/wiki/SyntheticBenchmarks .. [4] http://www.pytables.org/docs/manual/ch05.html#chunksizeFineTune .. [5] http://pytables.org/moin/ComputingKernel .. [6] http://pytables.org/moin/PyTablesPro Download sources ================ Please go to: http://blosc.pytables.org/sources/ and download the stable release from here. Blosc is distributed using the MIT license, see LICENSES/BLOSC.txt for details. ---- **Enjoy data!** -- Francesc Alted _______________________________________________ Hdf-forum is for HDF software users discussion. [email protected] http://mail.hdfgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/hdf-forum_hdfgroup.org
