Microsoft announcement came on the same day the Open Compute Project Global Summit 2019 kicked off. “Project Zipline is a cutting-edge compression technology optimized for a large variety of datasets, and our release of RTL (Register Transfer Language) allows hardware vendors to use the reference design to produce hardware chips to allow the highest compression, lowest cost, and lowest power out of the algorithm,” Microsoft said blog post. By open sourcing Project Zipline, Microsoft is allowing developers to create for the service. The company says it wants the Open Commute Project community to become a strong contributer to Zipline.
Open Contribution
In fact, Microsoft already has big plans for the project and envisions it becoming a core compression software for network data processing, cloud hardware, microprocessors, cloud edge devices, and more. “Microsoft’s Project Zipline compression algorithm yields dramatically better results, up to 2X high compression ratios versus the commonly used Zlib-L4 64KB model. Enhancements like this can lead to direct customer benefits in the potential for cost savings, for instance, and indirectly, access to petabytes or exabytes of capacity in a cost-effective way could enable new scenarios for our customers.” Microsoft has been with the Open Compute Project (OCP) since 2014. The company’s involvement in the organization has been important, including being a founder of the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI).
