A novel data-compression technique for faster computer programs

Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT

A novel technique developed by MIT researchers rethinks hardware data compression to free up more memory used by computers and mobile devices, allowing them to run faster and perform more tasks simultaneously. “The motivation was trying to come up with a new memory hierarchy that could do object-based compression, instead of cache-line compression, because that’s how most modern programming languages manage data,” says first author Po-An Tsai, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “The interesting thing about this work is that it uses the existing object abstraction as a way of making memory compression more effective, in turn making the system faster and more efficient with novel computer architecture features.”

Source: techxplore.com