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At least 19 records

cuZ-Checker: A GPU-Based Ultra-Fast Assessment System for Lossy Compressions

Lossy compression is becoming an indispensable technique for the success of today's extreme-scale high-performance computing projects that produce vast volumes of data during scientific simulations or instrument data acquisitions. Comprehensively understanding the compression quality and performance of different lossy compressors is critical to selecting the best-fit compressors and using them properly and efficiently in practice. A few lossy compression assessment tools (e.g., Z-checker) have been developed, but none of them support the execution in a GPU environment. This is a significant gap because many recent extreme-scale applications and lossy compressors (e.g., cuSZ) can run entirely within GPUs. In this work, we develop an efficient lossy compression measuring system (called cuZ-Checker) on the GPU platform, which aims to perform the lossy compression quality and performance assessment completely within the GPU environment. Our contribution is threefold. (1) We develop a novel GPU-based lossy compression measuring framework using a computation pattern-based design approach. This approach classifies the computing-intensive metrics into three categories based on their patterns which creates large opportunities for kernel fusion and data reuse. (2) For each pattern in cuZ-Checker, we develop a CUDA kernel and provide fine-grained optimizations to boost its performance. (3) We thoroughly evaluate our cuZ-checker on a V100 GPU using four real-world scientific application datasets. Experiments show that cuZ-Checker can significantly accelerate the overall lossy compression assessment performance by 23X similar to 31X compared with the OpenMP-based multithreading CPU performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first lossy compression measuring system designed for GPU devices.

GPU↗

Understanding Performance-Quality Trade-offs in Scientific Visualization Workflows with Lossy Compression

The cost of I/O is a significant challenge on current supercomputers, and the trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. This challenge is amplified in scientific visualization because of the requirement to consume large amounts of data before processing can begin. Lossy compression has become an important technique in reducing the cost of performing I/O. In this paper we consider the implications of using compressed data for visualization within a scientific workflow. We use visualization operations on simulation data that is reduced using three different state-of-the-art compression techniques. We study the storage efficiency and preservation of visualization features on the resulting compressed data, and draw comparisons between the three techniques used. Our contributions can help inform both scientists and researchers in the use and design of compression techniques for preservation of important visualization details.

Chen, Jieyang↗

Unsupervised classification-based hyperspectral data processing: lossy compression

The existing lossy compression algorithms play an important role in reducing the cost of storage equipment and bandwidth for hyperspectral (HS) application. However, none of the lossy compression algorithms considers the real-time classification of HS data. In this paper, we present a new lossy compression method for HS data that aims to optimally compress in both spatial and spectral domains and simultaneously maximize classification performance. For this target, Harsanyi–Farrand–Chang (HFC) and k-means++ algorithms are applied to achieve a spectral library and an index matrix for HS image. Spectral angle mapping and Euclidean distance are used to update the spectral library and the index matrix. The experiment results indicate that the proposed method has a good classification performance. The results also reveal that the proposed method works well in real-time classification and compression of HS data with a large volume and achieves a high compression ratio. It is noteworthy to mention that the superiority of our method in compression becomes more apparent as the volume of HS data grows. Consequently, the proposed method has a strong advantage in HS applications that require both compression and classification.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

TopoSZ: Preserving Topology in Error-Bounded Lossy Compression

Existing error-bounded lossy compression techniques control the pointwise error during compression to guarantee the integrity of the decompressed data. However, they typically do not explicitly preserve the topological features in data. When performing post hoc analysis with decompressed data using topological methods, preserving topology in the compression process to obtain topologically consistent and correct scientific insights is desirable. In this paper, we introduce TopoSZ, an error-bounded lossy compression method that preserves the topological features in 2D and 3D scalar fields. Specifically, we aim to preserve the types and locations of local extrema as well as the level set relations among critical points captured by contour trees in the decompressed data. The main idea is to derive topological constraints from contour-tree-induced segmentation from the data domain, and incorporate such constraints with a customized error-controlled quantization strategy from the SZ compressor (version 1.4). In conclusion, our method allows users to control the pointwise error and the loss of topological features during the compression process with a global error bound and a persistence threshold.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Accelerating Relative-error Bounded Lossy Compression for HPC datasets with Precomputation-Based Mechanisms

Scientific simulations in high-performance computing (HPC) environments are producing vast volume of data, which may cause a severe I/O bottleneck at runtime and a huge burden on storage space for post-analysis. Unlike the traditional data reduction schemes (such as deduplication or lossless compression), not only can error-controlled lossy compression significantly reduce the data size but it can also hold the promise to satisfy user demand on error control. Point-wise relative error bounds (i.e., compression errors depends on the data values) are widely used by many scientific applications in the lossy compression, since error control can adapt to the precision in the dataset automatically. Point-wise relative error bounded compression is complicated and time consuming. In this work, we develop efficient precomputation-based mechanisms in the SZ lossy compression framework. Our mechanisms can avoid costly logarithmic transformation and identify quantization factor values via a fast table lookup, greatly accelerating the relative-error bounded compression with excellent compression ratios. In addition, our mechanisms also help reduce traversing operations for Huffman decoding, and thus significantly accelerate the decompression process in SZ. Experiments with four well-known real-world scientific simulation datasets show that our solution can improve the compression rate by about 30% and decompression rate by about 70% in most of cases, making our designed lossy compression strategy the best choice in class in most cases.

compression rate↗

Performance Optimization for Relative-Error-Bounded Lossy Compression on Scientific Data

Scientific simulations in high-performance computing (HPC) environments generate vast volume of data, which may cause a severe I/O bottleneck at runtime and a huge burden on storage space for postanalysis. Unlike traditional data reduction schemes such as deduplication or lossless compression, not only can error-controlled lossy compression significantly reduce the data size but it also holds the promise to satisfy user demand on error control. Pointwise relative error bounds (i.e., compression errors depends on the data values) are widely used by many scientific applications with lossy compression since error control can adapt to the error bound in the dataset automatically. Pointwise relative-error-bounded compression is complicated and time consuming. In this article, we develop efficient precomputation-based mechanisms based on the SZ lossy compression framework. Our mechanisms can avoid costly logarithmic transformation and identify quantization factor values via a fast table lookup, greatly accelerating the relative-error-bounded compression with excellent compression ratios. In addition, we reduce traversing operations for Huffman decoding, significantly accelerating the decompression process in SZ. Experiments with eight well-known real-world scientific simulation datasets show that our solution can improve the compression and decompression rates (i.e., the speed) by about 40 and 80 p, respectively, in most of cases, making our designed lossy compression strategy the best-in-class solution in most cases.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

waveSZ: A Hardware-Algorithm Co-Design of Efficient Lossy Compression for Scientific Data

Error-bounded lossy compression is critical to the success of extreme-scale scientific research because of ever-increasing volumes of data produced by today's high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Not only can error-controlled lossy compressors significantly reduce the I/O and storage burden but they can retain high data fidelity for post analysis. Existing state-of-the-art lossy compressors, however, generally suffer from relatively low compression and decompression throughput (up to hundreds of megabytes per second on a single CPU core), which considerably restrict the adoption of lossy compression by many HPC applications especially those with a fairly high data production rate. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient lossy compression approach based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) under the state-of-the-art lossy compression model SZ. Our contributions are fourfold. (1) We adopt a wavefront memory layout to alleviate the data dependency during the prediction for higher-dimensional predictors, such as the Lorenzo predictor. (2) We propose a co-design framework named WAVESZ based on the wavefront memory layout and the characteristics of SZ algorithm and carefully implement it by using high-level synthesis. (3) We propose a hardware-algorithm co-optimization method to improve the performance. (4) We evaluate our proposed WAVESZ on three real-world HPC simulation datasets from the Scientific Data Reduction Benchmarks and compare it with other state-of-the-art methods on both CPUs and FPGAs. Experiments show that our WAVESZ can improve SZ's compression throughput by 6.9x similar to 8.7x over the production version running on a state-of-the-art CPU and improve the compression ratio and throughput by 2.1x and 5.8x on average, respectively, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art FPGA design.

Compression Ratio↗

A Survey on Error-Bounded Lossy Compression for Scientific Datasets

Error-bounded lossy compression has been effective in significantly reducing the data storage/transfer burden while preserving the reconstructed data fidelity very well. Many error-bounded lossy compressors have been developed for a wide range of parallel and distributed use cases for years. They are designed with distinct compression models and principles, such that each of them features particular pros and cons. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of emerging error-bounded lossy compression techniques. The key contribution is fourfold. (1) We summarize a novel taxonomy of lossy compression into six classic models. (2) We provide a comprehensive survey of 10 commonly used compression components/modules. (3) We summarized pros and cons of 47 state-of-the-art lossy compressors and present how state-of-the-art compressors are designed based on different compression techniques. (4) We discuss how customized compressors are designed for specific scientific applications and use-cases. We believe this survey is useful to multiple communities including scientific applications, high-performance computing, lossy compression, and big data.

Error-Bounded Lossy Compression↗

FRaZ: A Generic High-Fidelity Fixed-Ratio Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Floating-point Data

With ever-increasing volumes of scientific floating-point data being produced by high-performance computing applications, significantly reducing scientific floating-point data size is critical, and error-controlled lossy compressors have been developed for years. None of the existing scientific floating-point lossy data compressors, however, support effective fixed-ratio lossy compression. Yet fixed-ratio lossy compression for scientific floating-point data not only compresses to the requested ratio but also respects a user-specified error bound with higher fidelity. In this paper, we present FRaZ: a generic fixed-ratio lossy compression framework respecting user-specified error constraints. The contribution is twofold. (1) We develop an efficient iterative approach to accurately determine the appropriate error settings for different lossy compressors based on target compression ratios. (2) We perform a thorough performance and accuracy evaluation for our proposed fixed-ratio compression framework with multiple state-of-the-art error-controlled lossy compressors, using several real-world scientific floating-point datasets from different domains. Experiments show that FRaZ effectively identifies the optimum error setting in the entire error setting space of any given lossy compressor. While fixed-ratio lossy compression is slower than fixed-error compression, it provides an important new lossy compression technique for users of very large scientific floating-point datasets.

Underwood, Robert↗

Black-box statistical prediction of lossy compression ratios for scientific data

Lossy compressors are increasingly adopted in scientific research, tackling volumes of data from experiments or parallel numerical simulations and facilitating data storage and movement. In contrast with the notion of entropy in lossless compression, no theoretical or data-based quantification of lossy compressibility exists for scientific data. Users rely on trial and error to assess lossy compression performance. As a strong data-driven effort toward quantifying lossy compressibility of scientific datasets, we provide a statistical framework to predict compression ratios of lossy compressors. Our method is a two-step framework where (i) compressor-agnostic predictors are computed and (ii) statistical prediction models relying on these predictors are trained on observed compression ratios. Proposed predictors exploit spatial correlations and notions of entropy and lossyness via the quantized entropy. We study 8+ compressors on 6 scientific datasets and achieve a median percentage prediction error less than 12%, which is substantially smaller than that of other methods while achieving at least a 8.8× speedup for searching for a specific compression ratio and 7.8× speedup for determining the best compressor out of a collection.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

STZ: A High Quality and High Speed Streaming Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Data

Error-bounded lossy compression is one of the most efficient solutions to reduce the volume of scientific data. For lossy compression, progressive decompression and random-access decompression are critical features that enable on-demand data access and flexible analysis workflows. However, these features can severely degrade compression quality and speed. To address these limitations, we propose a novel streaming compression framework that supports both progressive decompression and random-access decompression while maintaining high compression quality and speed. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we design the first compression framework that simultaneously enables both progressive decompression and random-access decompression; (2) we introduce a hierarchical partitioning strategy to enable both streaming features, along with a hierarchical prediction mechanism that mitigates the impact of partitioning and achieves high compression quality—even comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) non-streaming compressor SZ3; and (3) our framework delivers high compression and decompression speed, up to 6.7 × faster than SZ3.

Wang, Daoce [University of Nebraska, Omaha]↗

Understanding and Modeling Lossy Compression Schemes on HPC Scientific Data

Scientific simulations generate large amounts of floating-point data, which are often not very compressible using the traditional reduction schemes, such as deduplication or lossless compression. The emergence of lossy floating-point compression holds promise to satisfy the data reduction demand from HPC applications; however, lossy compression has not been widely adopted in science production. We believe a fundamental reason is that there is a lack of understanding of the benefits, pitfalls, and performance of lossy compression on scientific data. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on state-of-the-art lossy compression, including ZFP, SZ, and ISABELA, using real and representative HPC datasets. Our evaluation reveals the complex interplay between compressor design, data features and compression performance. The impact of reduced accuracy on data analytics is also examined through a case study of fusion blob detection, offering domain scientists with the insights of what to expect from fidelity loss. Furthermore, the trial and error approach to understanding compression performance involves substantial compute and storage overhead. To this end, we propose a sampling based estimation method that extrapolates the reduction ratio from data samples, to guide domain scientists to make more informed data reduction decisions.

Lu, Tao↗

Exploring the feasibility of lossy compression for PDE simulations

Checkpoint restart plays an important role in high-performance computing (HPC) applications, allowing simulation runtime to extend beyond a single job allocation and facilitating recovery from hardware failure. Yet, as machines grow in size and in complexity, traditional approaches to checkpoint restart are becoming prohibitive. Current methods store a subset of the application’s state and exploit the memory hierarchy in the machine. However, as the energy cost of data movement continues to dominate, further reductions in checkpoint size are needed. Lossy compression, which can significantly reduce checkpoint sizes, offers a potential to reduce computational cost in checkpoint restart. This article investigates the use of numerical properties of partial differential equation (PDE) simulations, such as bounds on the truncation error, to evaluate the feasibility of using lossy compression in checkpointing PDE simulations. Restart from a checkpoint with lossy compression is considered for a fail-stop error in two time-dependent HPC application codes: PlasComCM and Nek5000. Results show that error in application variables due to a restart from a lossy compressed checkpoint can be masked by the numerical error in the discretization, leading to increased efficiency in checkpoint restart without influencing overall accuracy in the simulation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Multifacets of lossy compression for scientific data in the Joint-Laboratory of Extreme Scale Computing

The Joint Laboratory on Extreme-Scale Computing (JLESC) was initiated at the same time lossy compression for scientific data became an important topic for the scientific communities. The teams involved in the JLESC played and are still playing an important role in developing the research, techniques, methods, and technologies making lossy compression for scientific data a key tool for scientists and engineers. Here, in this paper, we present the evolution of lossy compression for scientific data from 2015, describing the situation before the JLESC started, the evolution of this discipline in the past 8 years (until 2023) through the prism of the JLESC collaborations on this topic and some of the remaining open research questions.

Compression for AI↗

zPerf: A Statistical Gray-Box Approach to Performance Modeling and Extrapolation for Scientific Lossy Compression

With the scaling up of simulation-based scientific discovery on high-performance computing systems, the disparity between compute and I/O has increased, forcing domain scientists to save only a small amount of simulation data to persistent storage. This can result in the loss of essential physics fields that are needed for data analysis. While error-bounded lossy compression has made tremendous progress in bridging the gap between compute and I/O, the lack of understanding of compression performance remains a key hurdle to its wide adoption. Here, in this work, we present zPerf, a statistical gray-box performance modeling approach for scientific lossy compression. Our contributions are threefold: 1) We develop zPerf to estimate the performance of lossy compression techniques, based on in-depth understanding and statistical modeling for data features and core compression metrics; 2) We demonstrate the in-detailed implementation of zPerf using two case studies, where we derive the performance modeling for SZ and ZFP, two leading lossy compressors; 3) We evaluate the effectiveness of zPerf on real-world datasets across various domains. Based on the evaluation, we demonstrate the efficacy of the zPerf performance model; 4) We further discuss three case studies where zPerf is applied to extrapolate the compression ratio of SZ and ZFP with alternative encoding schemes as well as ZFP with an alternative transform scheme. Through the case studies, we demonstrate the potential of zPerf for exploring the design space of lossy compression, which has hardly been studied in the literature.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Lossy compression of statistical data using quantum annealer

Abstract We present a new lossy compression algorithm for statistical floating-point data through a representation learning with binary variables. The algorithm finds a set of basis vectors and their binary coefficients that precisely reconstruct the original data. The optimization for the basis vectors is performed classically, while binary coefficients are retrieved through both simulated and quantum annealing for comparison. A bias correction procedure is also presented to estimate and eliminate the error and bias introduced from the inexact reconstruction of the lossy compression for statistical data analyses. The compression algorithm is demonstrated on two different datasets of lattice quantum chromodynamics simulations. The results obtained using simulated annealing show 3–3.5 times better compression performance than the algorithm based on neural-network autoencoder. Calculations using quantum annealing also show promising results, but performance is limited by the integrated control error of the quantum processing unit, which yields large uncertainties in the biases and coupling parameters. Hardware comparison is further studied between the previous generation D-Wave 2000Q and the current D-Wave Advantage system. Our study shows that the Advantage system is more likely to obtain low-energy solutions for the problems than the 2000Q.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Use cases of lossy compression for floating-point data in scientific data sets

Architectural and technological trends of systems used for scientific computing call for a significant reduction of scientific data sets that are composed mainly of floating-point data. Here, this article surveys and presents experimental results of currently identified use cases of generic lossy compression to address the different limitations of scientific computing systems. The article shows from a collection of experiments run on parallel systems of a leadership facility that lossy data compression not only can reduce the footprint of scientific data sets on storage but also can reduce I/O and checkpoint/restart times, accelerate computation, and even allow significantly larger problems to be run than without lossy compression. In conclusion, these results suggest that lossy compression will become an important technology in many aspects of high performance scientific computing. Because the constraints for each use case are different and often conflicting, this collection of results also indicates the need for more specialization of the compression pipelines.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗