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).

New (late July 08) benchmarks show Scala's HashMap is a lot slower than Java Collections Library. The immutable HashMap being slower seems understandable, but a 3-5x slowdown for using mutable HashMap instead of JCL? Ouch!

The Hoard memory allocator is a fast, scalable, and memory-efficient memory allocator. Hoard is a drop-in replacement for malloc() that can dramatically improve application performance, especially for multithreaded programs running on multiprocessors.

Applications that process large volumes of data (such as, search engines, grid computing applications, data mining applications, etc.) require a backend infrastructure for storing data.

Ragel compiles executable finite state machines from regular languages. Ragel targets C, C++, Objective-C, D, Java and Ruby.

AMD's new Barcelona processor is using a really strange cache hierarchy

Dynamic optimization refers to the runtime optimization of a native program binary. This paper describes the design and implementation of Dynamo, a prototype dynamic optimizer that is capable of optimizing a native program binary at runtime.