“People are creating, sharing, and storing data at a faster rate than at any other time in history. When it comes to innovating on storing and transmitting that data, at Facebook we’re making advancements not only in hardware — such as larger hard drives and faster networking equipment — but in software as well. Software helps with data processing through compression, which encodes information, like text, pictures, and other forms of digital data, using fewer bits than the original. These smaller files take up less space on hard drives and are transmitted faster to other systems. There’s a trade-off to compressing and decompressing information, though: time. The more time spent compressing to a smaller file, the slower the data is to process. Today, the reigning data compression standard is Deflate, the core algorithm inside Zip, gzip, and zlib [2]. For two decades, it has provided an impressive balance between speed and space, and, as a result, it is used in almost every modern electronic device (and, not coincidentally, used to transmit every byte of the very blog post you are reading). Over the years, other algorithms have offered either better compression or faster compression, but rarely both. We believe we’ve changed this.”
Related Content
Related Posts:
- Microsoft and Facebook create open ecosystem for AI model interoperability
- Facebook open sources Caffe2, its flexible deep learning framework of choice
- Facebook is giving away the software it uses to understand objects in photos
- Surround 360 is now open source
- Linux Kernel 6.6 Arrives With Numerous Refinements
- Linux 6.5 kernel arrives with exciting new features
- Linux Kernel 6.4 Released: Embracing Apple M2, New Hardware, and More Rust Code
- Debian 12 bookworm released
- CircuitPython 8.1.0 Released
- Arduino IDE 2.1 is now available!