Ocarina Unveils $1 Million Prize Fund to Advance the State of Compression Research for Data Storage
Prize Announcement Follows Compression Summit Featuring Leading Industry Researchers
| Source: Ocarina Networks
SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - September 10, 2008) - Ocarina Networks, provider of the
industry's first online storage optimization solution, today challenged the
storage industry to become ten times more efficient in power, cooling, and
space utilization by 2010. As part of the challenge, the company announced
the Ocarina Compression Prize, an initiative backed by more than $1 million
in award money to encourage advances in file type specific compression
algorithms for storage.
The Ocarina Prize comes on the heels of the inaugural Ocarina Compression
Summit, a gathering of the world's top compression researchers and experts
held August 5-7 in San Jose, California. The Summit brought together top
minds in the compression industry from all over the world to explore the
role of data compression in dealing with the challenges associated with
skyrocketing storage demands and the related financial and environmental
concerns.
The Ocarina Prize will be presented as a series of awards for advancements
in content-aware compression algorithms and techniques for specific file
types. Ocarina will award the winner $10,000 U.S. dollars for each
submission that advances the current best scoring compressor by three
percent or more, with a total pool of up to $1,000,000 allocated for the
awards.
"Ocarina is positioning itself as a leader in the field of data
compression, both by recruiting the top minds in the field, and by
sponsoring this contest," said Dr. Matt Mahoney, a recognized thought
leader in the field of next generation data compression who recently joined
the company as chief scientist. "The Ocarina Prize is the largest ever
offered in a data compression contest, with some extremely challenging
data."
The initial prize fund will include awards for three categories -- JPEG
2000 recompression, h.264 video recompression, and an industry file mix for
engineering CAD file types. Submissions can be from individuals or
companies, and may be open or closed source. Contestants will be judged on
their overall reduction of a test data set within a fixed time period. For
more information, visit: http://ocarinanetworks.com/prize/index.html.
"This prize serves as a great catalyst to attract the attention of top
researchers to what has and will continue to be a growing problem: reducing
the size of files that drive today's storage growth," said Dr. Przemyslaw
Skibinski, who recently joined Ocarina's research team. "This has not only
business benefits for end-users who may have to purchase less storage, but
also has potentially profound environmental benefits, as the amount of
power and cooling required to store the world's data will decrease in
direct proportion to the degree to which it can be effectively compressed."
Ocarina Compression Summit: Showcasing Innovation, Exploring Industry
Challenges
Approaches to online storage have to date struggled to keep pace with the
explosive growth of data. At the heart of this problem are outdated
compression technologies that do not allow storage vendors to achieve the
optimal capacity from the solutions. This in turn has led to a
proliferation of storage devices across data centers, burdening them with
higher energy, bandwidth and operational requirements.
While significant advances in efficiency have been made for backup data
with deduplication techniques and for data moving across networks with WAN
optimization, online storage requires a unique set of solutions and has
until now remained a key unaddressed problem area.
To address the relationship between the growing storage gap and compression
technologies, the recent Ocarina Compression Summit called together
researchers who have won every major competitive prize in advancing
information theory and compression technology, including keynote speaker
Dr. Robert Gray, this year's holder of the top honor in the field of
Information Theory, the Shannon Prize. Other attendees included multiple
winners of the Hutter Prize, the Calgary Corpus Challenge, and the Large
Text Compression Benchmark.
Summit highlights included presentations on breakthrough algorithms for
video file recompression for both MPEG-2 and h.264 videos, the video file
types that make up the bulk of today's internet and broadcast video. These
new algorithms are projected to be incorporated into Ocarina's online
storage data reduction solutions in the first half of 2009.
About Ocarina
Ocarina is a leader in online storage optimization solutions. Organizations
of all sizes use Ocarina's file-aware optimization technology to reduce
their storage footprint and achieve a ten-fold capacity increase on their
current storage systems. Based in San Jose, Calif., Ocarina is privately
held and financed by leading investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and
Highland Capital Partners. For more information, visit
www.ocarinanetworks.com.
Product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their
respective owners.