How Silicon Valley’s Pied Piper moved from fiction to reality with new compression tech

HBO’s comedy series Silicon Valley received critical acclaim and a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Like most great comedies, the show’s success is likely thanks to its ability to offer a satirical take on true-to-life scenarios on some of the more outlandish elements of the Bay Area tech scene between 2014-2019.

In this case, the founder of Pied Piper and his team are on a mission to bring his novel compression technology out into the world where it can scale to the masses. 

Back when the series was in production, this compression technology wasn’t much more than a clever storytelling device that served to show what a niche this scrappy startup had found with its groundbreaking solution. 

Yet if we fast forward to 2024, with the boom in GenAI technology and unprecedented demand for data, there’s never been more urgent need for a solution akin to that put forward by the creators of Silicon Valley, 

However, it seems like one company has succeeded in creating a surprisingly similar compression model that looks to break through the huge data volumes at play today. 

To understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

In the series, Pied Piper is a compression startup that provides instant access to your data.

And it’s far from the only example of life imitating art. Indeed, the concept of a data compression tool isn’t the only element of Pied Piper that crossed over into reality. 

In fact for the research of the show professors were consulted, with the Weissman Score being a new compression metric developed for the series itself. However, this didn’t stop real-world researchers from actually using it. 

Meanwhile, Vinith Misra, a researcher at IBM’s Watson Group consulted for the show, went so far as to write a technical paper that offered a fictional improvement to the compression algorithm.

However, while the compression algorithm put forward for the show was fiction, a powerful new breed of GPUs and advanced processing chips mean that next-level data processing capabilities are now within the realms of possibility. 

Bringing Pied Piper’s dream into reality 

While a few companies are getting closer to earning the title of the ‘real Pied Piper’ for data compression, one New York startup is garnering plenty of attention of late for its strides forward in this specialism. 

SQream Blue, the data lakehouse solution from the data acceleration platform, recently outperformed similar solutions on the market by a country mile.

When it comes to speed and cost, SQream Blue and its patented technology compression solution performed 3 times faster and at half the cost of Databricks during the comparison element of the test.

To put this into closer detail, SQream Blue’s total runtime was 2462.6 seconds, with the total cost for processing the data end-to-end being $26.94. Databricks’ total runtime was 8332.4 seconds, at a cost of $76.94, indicating a significant cost-performance advantage by SQream Blue for big data analysis. 

To get these results, SQream ran the benchmark on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a scale factor of 30,000, which creates a dataset of around 30 TB, to test the relative capabilities of SQream at scale. All generated data was stored as Apache Parquet files on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon  S3), and the queries were processed without pre-loading into a database.

According to the announcement, the SQream Blue’s unparalleled speed was equivalent to reading every cataloged book in the US Library of Congress in under an hour – and then buying them all for less than $25, giving a close reminder of Pied Piper’s standout results on the Weissman test on the infamous Silicon Valley episode at TechCrunch Disrupt.  

In 2024, these kinds of gains can’t come quickly enough. 

Tackling our data addiction 

Gavin Belson, billionaire senior executive and main antagonist on Silicon Valley, delivered a telling rant on this subject, “Data creation is exploding. With all the selfies and useless files people refuse to delete on the cloud, 92 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. At the current rate, the world’s data storage capacity will be overtaken by next spring. It will be nothing short of a catastrophe.”

“Data shortages, data rationing, data black markets. Someone’s compression will save the world from data-geddon, and it sure as hell better be Nucleus and not goddamn Pied Piper!”

But this isn’t just about selfies and content. Public clouds now host more than half of all enterprise workloads and some businesses spend upwards of $12 million annually on that space. 

This represents a huge amount of business-critical data that is at the point of being unsustainable to manage using current methods. It’s for this reason that the real world does need a Pied Piper.