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Blosc

License information

Blosc has a BSD-style license that can be read online in the GitHub repository.

User documentation

What is Blosc?

Blosc 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 (which is typical in vector-vector operations).

It uses the blocking technique (as described in this article) to reduce activity on the memory bus as much as possible. In short, the blocking technique works by dividing datasets in blocks that are small enough to fit in L1 cache of modern processor and perform compression/decompression there. It also leverages SIMD (SSE2) and multi-threading capabilities present in nowadays multi-core processors so as to accelerate the compression/decompression process to a maximum.

Pre-installed modules (and EasyConfigs)

To access module help and find out for which stacks and partitions the module is installed, use module spider Blosc/<version>.

EasyConfig:

Technical documentation

EasyBuild

Version 1.21.0 from CPE 21.06 on

  • The EasyConfig is based on the EasyBuilders one with the documentation taken from the University of Antwerpen EasyConfig.

  • With the clang-based compilers CMake didn't like the 'cstd': 'c++11' toolchain option used by the default EasyConfig files.

Version 1.21.1 from CPE 22.08 on

  • Minor version bump of the 1.22.1 EasyConfig.

Version 1.21.2 from CPE 22.12 on

  • Minor version bump of the 1.21.1 EasyConfig.

Version 1.21.5 from CPE 23.09 on

  • Done before the package was even added to 2023a. The 1.21.3 version that was used by EasyBuild for 2022b was even removed from the repository so likely contained some annoying bugs.

  • Trivial bump of the 1.21.2 EasyConfig.

Archived EasyConfigs

The EasyConfigs below are additonal easyconfigs that are not directly available on the system for installation. Users are advised to use the newer ones and these archived ones are unsupported. They are still provided as a source of information should you need this, e.g., to understand the configuration that was used for earlier work on the system.