[Beowulf] Accelerator for data compressing

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 02:17:52AM -0700, Bill Broadley wrote:

> Er, that makes no sense to me.  You aren't going to end up with a smaller 
> file by encoding a file less efficiently.

I often find that floating-point data doesn't compress much, but that
ASCII representations of the same data compresses to a file smaller
than the binary one. This is with gzip/bzip2, so we're talking
dictionary-based compression -- and it's easy to imagine why this
might be true. I've never seen any float-point-oriented compressor
like the ones specialized for photos (jpeg, etc.)

-- greg