We have finished first phase of research to increase performance of lossless data compression algorithms.
Bzip2 was chosen for the prototype, our team optimized only one operation - Burrows–Wheeler transformation, and we got some results: 2x-4x speed up on good compressible files. The code works faster on all our tests.
We are going to complete bzip2, support deflate and LZMA for some real life tasks like: HTTP traffic and backups compression.
blog link:
http://www.wave-access.com/public_en/blog/2011/april/22/breakthrough-in-cuda-data-compression.aspx