Computing Expressions in Blosc2
What expressions are?
The forthcoming version of Blosc2 will bring a powerful tool for performing mathematical operations on pre-compressed arrays, that is, on arrays whose data has been reduced in size using compression techniques. This functionality provides a flexible and efficient way to perform a wide range of operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and other mathematical functions, directly on compressed arrays. This approach saves time and resources, especially when working with large data sets.
An example of expression computation in Blosc2 might be:
dtype = np.float64
shape = [30_000, 4_000]
size = shape[0] * shape[1]
a = np.linspace(0, 10, num=size, dtype=dtype).reshape(shape)
b = np.linspace(0, 10, num=size, dtype=dtype).reshape(shape)
c = np.linspace(0, 10, num=size, dtype=dtype).reshape(shape)
# Convert numpy arrays to Blosc2 arrays
a1 = blosc2.asarray(a, cparams=cparams)
b1 = blosc2.asarray(b, cparams=cparams)
c1 = blosc2.asarray(c, cparams=cparams)
# Perform the mathematical operation
expr = a1 + b1 * c1 # LazyExpr expression
expr += 2 # expressions can be modified
output = expr.compute(cparams=cparams) # compute! (output is compressed too)
Compressed arrays ( a1, b1, c1) are created from existing numpy arrays ( a, b, c) using Blosc2, then mathematical operations are performed on these compressed arrays using general algebraic expressions. The computation of these expressions is lazy, in that they are not evaluated immediately, but are meant to be evaluated later. Finally, the resulting expression is actually computed (via .compute()) and the desired output (compressed as well) is obtained.