This document describes the motivation for, elements of, and use of the zorder-lib, a library API that implements organization of and access to data in memory using either a-order (also known as “row-major” order) or z-order memory layouts. The primary motivation for this work is to improve the performance of many types of data-intensive codes by increasing both spatial and temporal locality of memory accesses. The basic idea is that the cost associated with accessing a datum is less when it is nearby in either space or time.
