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Ranka, Sanjay

Publications and source records attributed to Ranka, Sanjay.

A General Framework for Error-controlled Unstructured Scientific Data Compression

Data compression plays a key role in reducing storage and I/O costs. Traditional lossy methods primarily target data on rectilinear grids and cannot leverage the spatial coherence in unstructured mesh data, leading to suboptimal compression ratios. We present a multi-component, error-bounded compression framework designed to enhance the compression of floating-point unstructured mesh data, which is common in scientific applications. Our approach involves interpolating mesh data onto a rectilinear grid and then separately compressing the grid interpolation and the interpolation residuals. This method is general, independent of mesh types and typologies, and can be seamlessly integrated with existing lossy compressors for improved performance. We evaluated our framework across twelve variables from two synthetic datasets and two real-world simulation datasets. The results indicate that the multi-component framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art lossy compressors on unstructured data, achieving, on average, a 2.3 − 3.5× improvement in compression ratios, with error bounds ranging from 1 × 10 the −6 to 1×10−2. We further investigate impact of hyperparameters, such as grid spacing and error allocation, to deliver optimal compression ratios in diverse datasets.

Gong, Qian↗

Toward Improving the Generation Quality of Autoregressive Slot VAEs

Unconditional scene inference and generation are challenging to learn jointly with a single compositional model. Despite encouraging progress on models that extract object-centric representations (“slots”) from images, unconditional generation of scenes from slots has received less attention. This is primarily because learning the multiobject relations necessary to imagine coherent scenes is difficult. We hypothesize that most existing slot-based models have a limited ability to learn object correlations. We propose two improvements that strengthen object correlation learning. The first is to condition the slots on a global, scene-level variable that captures higher-order correlations between slots. Second, we address the fundamental lack of a canonical order for objects in images by proposing to learn a consistent order to use for the autoregressive generation of scene objects. Specifically, we train an autoregressive slot prior to sequentially generate scene objects following a learned order. Ordered slot inference entails first estimating a randomly ordered set of slots using existing approaches for extracting slots from images, then aligning those slots to ordered slots generated autoregressively with the slot prior. Our experiments across three multiobject environments demonstrate clear gains in unconditional scene generation quality. Detailed ablation studies are also provided that validate the two proposed improvements.

MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hybrid Approaches for Data Reduction of Spatiotemporal Scientific Applications

Scientists conduct large-scale simulations to compute derived quantities from primary data. Thus, it is crucial that data compression techniques maintain bounded errors on these derived quantities or quantities of interest (QOI). For many spatiotemporal applications, these QOIs are binary in nature and represent presence or absence of a physical phenomenon. In this work, we propose to use a hybrid approah for differential compression for such applications. We use a neural network (NN) approach to determine regions-of-interest (ROIs) where the binary QOIs are going to be prevalent. This is then used with traditional approaches that compress at a lower level (and higher accuracy) for these ROIs as compared to other regions.

Li, Xiao↗

Fast Algorithms for Scientific Data Compression

Many scientific simulations and experiments generate terabytes to petabytes of data daily, necessitating data compression techniques. Unlike video and image compression, scientists require methods that accurately preserve primary data (PD) and derived quantities of interest (QoIs). In our previous work, we demonstrated the effectiveness of hybrid compression techniques that combine machine learning with traditional approaches. This paper presents innovative computational techniques aimed at expediting the compression pipeline. Our experiments, conducted on two distinct platforms with a large-scale XGC-based fusion simulation, demonstrate that the overhead incurred by these new approaches is less than one percent of the computational resources needed for the simulation.

Banerjee, Tania↗

Spatiotemporally Adaptive Compression for Scientific Dataset with Feature Preservation – A Case Study on Simulation Data with Extreme Climate Events Analysis

Scientific discoveries are increasingly constrained by limited storage space and I/O capacities. For time-series simulations and experiments, their data often need to be decimated over timesteps to accommodate storage and I/O limitations. In this paper, we propose a technique that addresses storage costs while improving post-analysis accuracy through spatiotemporal adaptive, error-controlled lossy compression. We investigate the trade-off between data precision and temporal output rates, revealing that reducing data precision and increasing timestep frequency lead to more accurate analysis outcomes. Additionally, we integrate spatiotemporal feature detection with data compression and demonstrate that performing adaptive error-bounded compression in higher dimensional space enables greater compression ratios, leveraging the error propagation theory of a transformation-based compressor. To evaluate our approach, we conduct experiments using the well-known E3SM climate simulation code and apply our method to compress variables used for cyclone tracking. Our results show a significant reduction in storage size while enhancing the quality of cyclone tracking analysis, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in comparison to the prevalent timestep decimation approach. Compared to three state-of-the-art lossy compressors lacking feature preservation capabilities, our adaptive compression framework improves perfectly matched cases in TC tracking by 26.4-51.3% at medium compression ratios and by 77.3-571.1% at large compression ratios, with a merely 5–11% computational overhead.

Gong, Qian↗

Online and Scalable Data Compression Pipeline with Guarantees on Quantities of Interest

Data compression is becoming critical for data-intensive scientific applications. Scientists require compression techniques that accurately preserve derived quantities of interest (QoIs). Prior work has shown that a pipeline can be built to guarantee error on the primary data (PD) within user-defined bounds and achieve near-floating point QoI errors. In this paper, we present novel computational approaches for accelerating the pipeline and demonstrate results that enable concurrent execution of compression in parallel with the simulation nodes. This allows compression, including the writing of the required compression data, for the previous time step to be completed while the simulation proceeds with the current time step. Overall, the approach presented in this paper results in a 6–8 times improvement in computational overhead compared to previous work. These results were obtained using data generated by a large-scale fusion code called XGC, which produces hundreds of terabytes of data in a single day.

Banerjee, Tania↗

Learning Canonical Embeddings for Unsupervised Shape Correspondence With Locally Linear Transformations

We present a new approach to unsupervised shape correspondence learning between pairs of point clouds. We make the first attempt to adapt the classical locally linear embedding algorithm (LLE)-originally designed for nonlinear dimensionality reduction-for shape correspondence. The key idea is to find dense correspondences between shapes by first obtaining high-dimensional neighborhood-preserving embeddings of low-dimensional point clouds and subsequently aligning the source and target embeddings using locally linear transformations. We demonstrate that learning the embedding using a new LLE-inspired point cloud reconstruction objective results in accurate shape correspondences. More specifically, the approach comprises an end-to-end learnable framework of extracting high-dimensional neighborhood-preserving embeddings, estimating locally linear transformations in the embedding space, and reconstructing shapes via divergence measure-based alignment of probability density functions built over reconstructed and target shapes. Our approach enforces embeddings of shapes in correspondence to lie in the same universal/canonical embedding space, which eventually helps regularize the learning process and leads to a simple nearest neighbors approach between shape embeddings for finding reliable correspondences. Comprehensive experiments show that the new method makes noticeable improvements over state-of-the-art approaches on standard shape correspondence benchmark datasets covering both human and nonhuman shapes.

deformation↗

An Algorithmic and Software Pipeline for Very Large Scale Scientific Data Compression with Error Guarantees

Efficient data compression is becoming increasingly critical for storing scientific data because many scientific applications produce vast amounts of data. This paper presents an end-to-end algorithmic and software pipeline for data compression that guarantees both error bounds on primary data (PD) and derived data, known as Quantities of Interest (QoI).We demonstrate the effectiveness of the pipeline by compressing fusion data generated by a large-scale fusion code, XGC, which produces tens of petabytes of data in a single day. We demonstrate that the compression is conducted by setting aside computational resources known as staging nodes, and does not impact the simulation performance. For efficient parallel I/O, the pipeline uses ADIOS2, which many codes such as XGC already use for their parallel I/O. We show that our approach can compress the data by two orders of magnitude while guaranteeing high accuracy on both the PD and the QoIs. Further, the amount of resources required by compression is a few percent of the resources required by simulation while ensuring that the compression time for each stage is less than the corresponding simulation time.This pipeline consists of three main steps. The first step decomposes the data using domain decomposition into small subdomains. Each subdomain is then compressed independently to achieve a high level of parallelism. The second step uses existing techniques that guarantee error bounds on the primary data for each subdomain. The third step uses a post-processing optimization technique based on Lagrange multipliers to reduce the QoI errors for data corresponding to each subdomain. The Lagrange multipliers generated can be further quantized or truncated to increase the compression level. All of the above characteristics of our approach make it highly practical to apply on-the-fly compression while guaranteeing errors on QoIs that are critical to the scientists.

Banerjee, Tania↗

Error-Bounded Learned Scientific Data Compression with Preservation of Derived Quantities

Scientific applications continue to grow and produce extremely large amounts of data, which require efficient compression algorithms for long-term storage. Compression errors in scientific applications can have a deleterious impact on downstream processing. Thus, it is crucial to preserve all the “known” Quantities of Interest (QoI) during compression. To address this issue, most existing approaches guarantee the reconstruction error of the original data or primary data (PD), but cannot directly control the problem of preserving the QoI. In this work, we propose a physics-informed compression technique that is composed of two parts: (i) reduction of the PD with bounded errors and (ii) preservation of the QoI. In the first step, we combine tensor decompositions, autoencoders, product quantizers, and error-bounded lossy compressors to bound the reconstruction error at high levels of compression. In the second step, we use constraint satisfaction post-processing followed by quantization to preserve the QoI. To illustrate the challenges of reducing the reconstruction errors of the PD and QoI, we focus on simulation data generated by a large-scale fusion code, XGC, which can produce tens of petabytes in a single day. The results show that our approach can achieve a high compression amount while accurately preserving the QoI within scientifically acceptable bounds.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Region-adaptive, Error-controlled Scientific Data Compression using Multilevel Decomposition

The increase of computer processing speed is significantly outpacing improvements in network and storage bandwidth, leading to the big data challenge in modern science, where scientific applications can quickly generate much more data than that can be transferred and stored. As a result, big scientific data must be reduced by a few orders of magnitude while the accuracy of the reduced data needs to be guaranteed for further scientific explorations. Moreover, scientists are often interested in some specific spatial/temporal regions in their data, where higher accuracy is required. The locations of the regions requiring high accuracy can sometimes be prescribed based on application knowledge, while other times they must be estimated based on general spatial/temporal variation. In this paper, we develop a novel multilevel approach which allows users to impose region-wise compression error bounds. Our method utilizes the byproduct of a multilevel compressor to detect regions where details are rich and we provide the theoretical underpinning for region-wise error control. With spatially varying precision preservation, our approach can achieve significantly higher compression ratios than single-error bounded compression approaches and control errors in the regions of interest.We conduct the evaluations on two climate use cases – one targeting small-scale, node features and the other focusing on long, areal features. For both use cases, the locations of the features were unknown ahead of the compression. By selecting approximately 16% of the data based on multi-scale spatial variations and compressing those regions with smaller error tolerances than the rest, our approach improves the accuracy of post-analysis by approximately 2 × compared to single-error-bounded compression at the same compression ratio. Using the same error bound for the region of interest, our approach can achieve an increase of more than 50% in overall compression ratio.

Gong, Qian↗

Verification of Data-Driven Models of Physical Phenomena using Interpretable Approximation

Machine-learned models, specifically neural networks, are increasingly used as “closures” or “constitutive models” in engineering simulators to represent fine-scale physical phenomena that are too computationally expensive to resolve explicitly. However, these neural net models of unresolved physical phenomena tend to fail unpredictably and are therefore not used in mission-critical simulations. In this report, we describe new methods to authenticate them, i.e., to determine the (physical) information content of their training datasets, qualify the scenarios where they may be used and to verify that the neural net, as trained, adhere to physics theory. We demonstrate these methods with neural net closure of turbulent phenomena used in Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations. We show the types of turbulent physics extant in our training datasets, and, using a test flow of an impinging jet, identify the exact locations where the neural network would be extrapolating i.e., where it would be used outside the feature-space where it was trained. Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models, we also generate explanations of the neural net (à la Local Interpretable Model agnostic Explanations) at prototypes placed in the training data and compare them with approximate analytical models from turbulence theory. Finally, we verify our findings by reproducing them using two different methods.

42 ENGINEERING↗