Blosc is a high performance compressor optimized for binary data.
It has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster
than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach
via a memcpy() OS call. Blosc is the first compressor (that I'm aware of)
that is meant not only to reduce the size of large datasets on-disk or
in-memory, but also to accelerate memory-bound computations.

WWW: http://blosc.org/