
Breaking Down Memory Walls - espeed
http://www.blosc.org/posts/breaking-memory-walls/
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nkurz
The interesting part about this presentation (for someone like me who isn't
familiar with Blosc) is the chart for the AMD EPYC processor showing faster
overall performance with compressed data. This is a surprisingly rare result
to actually see in a realistic benchmark. You need both very fast
decompression, and a (commensurately) large number of cores.

The more common tradeoff is that compression allows you to keep more data in
RAM, which gives you a speedup compared to keeping (say) 1/4 the data in RAM
and 3/4 on disk. But in the luxurious case that you sufficient RAM to fit all
your data, it's usually faster to skip the compression and accept the memory
bottleneck.

While the theory of getting faster results with compressed data is easy, this
is one of the first real world examples that shows it actually happening
(albeit on only one of the processors the tested). More common for benchmarks
is the case shown in the full PDF, which shows that on easily compressible
synthetic data the compression is an easier (though still not easy) win.

Nice work!

------
yazr
TLDR: testing on-the-fly memory (de)compression on contagious memory
benchmarks

