* A note on compression: Big Data is heavily (and losslessly) compressed - typically 2x to 4x better than GZIP on disk (YMMV), and can be accessed like a Java Array (a Giant greater-than-4billion-element distributed Java array). H2O guarantees that if the data is accessed linearly then
the access time will match what you can get out of C or Fortran - i.e., be memory bandwidth bound, not CPU bound. You can access the array (for both reads and writes) in any order, of course, but you get strong speed guarantees for accessing in-order. You can do pretty much anything to an H2O array that you can do with a Java array, although due to size/scale you'll probably want to access the array in a blatantly parallel style.
* A note on decompression: The data is decompressed Just-In-Time strictly in CPU registers in the hot inner loops - and THIS IS FASTER than decompressing beforehand because most algorithms are memory bandwidth bound. Moving a 32byte cached line of compressed data into CPU registers gets more data per-cache-miss than moving 4 8-byte doubles. Decompression typically takes 2-4 instructions of shift/scale/add per element, and is well covered by the cache-miss costs. As an example,
adding a billion compressed doubles (e.g., to compute the average) takes 12ms on a 32-core (dual-socket) E5-2670 Intel -
an achieved bandwidth of over 600Gb/sec - hugely faster than all other Big Data solutions. Accounting for compression, H2O achieved 83Gb/sec out of the theoretical maximum of 100Gb/sec on this hardware.