freevec.org

While completing Eigen2 AltiVec support (should be almost complete now), I noticed that the 32-bit integer multiplication didn't work correctly all of the time. As AltiVec does not really include any instruction to do 32-bit integer multiplication, I used Apple's routine from the Apple Developer's site. But this didn't work and some results were totally off. With some debugging, I found out that this routine works for unsigned 32-bit integers, where Eigen2 uses signed integers! So, I had to search more, and to my surprise, I found no reference of any similar work. So I had 2 choices: a) ditch AltiVec integer vectorisation from Eigen2 (not acceptable!) b) implement my own method! It is obvious which choice I followed :)
UPDATE: Thanks to Matt Sealey, who noticed I could have used vec_abs() instead of vec_sub() and vec_max(). Duh! :D

Hashing a piece of data is one of the most time consuming process in a a database. Basically, the process builds a unique integer (aka 'hash key') from a series of operations on the objects bytes. Usually these algorithms are not parallelizable, or at least not easily parallelizable, due to the dependency to previous calculations involved. Taking a single family of hashing algorithms, we will provide (with mathematical proof) a second deterministic way of calculating the Nth hash, using easily parallelizable tecniques and also provide the Altivec equivalent of this algorithm.