What does HackerNews think of isa-l?

Your link seems to compare GNU gzip with zstd. When comparing file formats, I would compare the best software for that file format. igzip: https://github.com/intel/isa-l can decompress consistently faster than GNU gzip. Depending on the file, it decompresses 2-3x faster making it almost as fast as zstd decompression. I have less experience with compression benchmarks. A quick benchmark on Silesia shows igzip to be ~7x faster but it sacrifices 10% of compression ratio for that even on its highest compression setting. It seems to be optimized for speed.

igzip (https://github.com/intel/isa-l) is much faster than gzip or pigz when it comes to decompression, 2-3x in my experience. There is also a Python module (isal) that provides a GzipFile-like wrapper class, for an easy speed-up of Python scripts that read gzipped files.

However, it only supports up to level 3 when compressing data, so it can't be used as a drop-in replacement for gzip. You also need to make sure to use the latest version if you are going to use it in the context of bioinformatics, since older versions choke on concatenated gzip files common in that field.

> (see mary wootters' talks on youtube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh578e98qAk

> Suppose I want to write a library to find compression polynomials for reed-solomon encoding system (see mary wootters' talks on youtube) for my storage product. I need a LU decomposition algorithm that operates on GF256

Surely you use isa-l[1].

[1] https://github.com/intel/isa-l

> Now I want to accelerate the search by running the search on GPUs.

GPUs are float oriented so I don't think you'll get the performance you hope for out of 8 bit integer operations. If you have interesting results to share I'd like to read them.