3,677 research outputs found
Data Compression in the Petascale Astronomy Era: a GERLUMPH case study
As the volume of data grows, astronomers are increasingly faced with choices
on what data to keep -- and what to throw away. Recent work evaluating the
JPEG2000 (ISO/IEC 15444) standards as a future data format standard in
astronomy has shown promising results on observational data. However, there is
still a need to evaluate its potential on other type of astronomical data, such
as from numerical simulations. GERLUMPH (the GPU-Enabled High Resolution
cosmological MicroLensing parameter survey) represents an example of a data
intensive project in theoretical astrophysics. In the next phase of processing,
the ~27 terabyte GERLUMPH dataset is set to grow by a factor of 100 -- well
beyond the current storage capabilities of the supercomputing facility on which
it resides. In order to minimise bandwidth usage, file transfer time, and
storage space, this work evaluates several data compression techniques.
Specifically, we investigate off-the-shelf and custom lossless compression
algorithms as well as the lossy JPEG2000 compression format. Results of
lossless compression algorithms on GERLUMPH data products show small
compression ratios (1.35:1 to 4.69:1 of input file size) varying with the
nature of the input data. Our results suggest that JPEG2000 could be suitable
for other numerical datasets stored as gridded data or volumetric data. When
approaching lossy data compression, one should keep in mind the intended
purposes of the data to be compressed, and evaluate the effect of the loss on
future analysis. In our case study, lossy compression and a high compression
ratio do not significantly compromise the intended use of the data for
constraining quasar source profiles from cosmological microlensing.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables. Published in the Special Issue of
Astronomy & Computing on The future of astronomical data format
Improving Performance of Iterative Methods by Lossy Checkponting
Iterative methods are commonly used approaches to solve large, sparse linear
systems, which are fundamental operations for many modern scientific
simulations. When the large-scale iterative methods are running with a large
number of ranks in parallel, they have to checkpoint the dynamic variables
periodically in case of unavoidable fail-stop errors, requiring fast I/O
systems and large storage space. To this end, significantly reducing the
checkpointing overhead is critical to improving the overall performance of
iterative methods. Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a novel lossy
checkpointing scheme that can significantly improve the checkpointing
performance of iterative methods by leveraging lossy compressors. (2) We
formulate a lossy checkpointing performance model and derive theoretically an
upper bound for the extra number of iterations caused by the distortion of data
in lossy checkpoints, in order to guarantee the performance improvement under
the lossy checkpointing scheme. (3) We analyze the impact of lossy
checkpointing (i.e., extra number of iterations caused by lossy checkpointing
files) for multiple types of iterative methods. (4)We evaluate the lossy
checkpointing scheme with optimal checkpointing intervals on a high-performance
computing environment with 2,048 cores, using a well-known scientific
computation package PETSc and a state-of-the-art checkpoint/restart toolkit.
Experiments show that our optimized lossy checkpointing scheme can
significantly reduce the fault tolerance overhead for iterative methods by
23%~70% compared with traditional checkpointing and 20%~58% compared with
lossless-compressed checkpointing, in the presence of system failures.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, HPDC'1
Parallel Implementation of Lossy Data Compression for Temporal Data Sets
Many scientific data sets contain temporal dimensions. These are the data
storing information at the same spatial location but different time stamps.
Some of the biggest temporal datasets are produced by parallel computing
applications such as simulations of climate change and fluid dynamics. Temporal
datasets can be very large and cost a huge amount of time to transfer among
storage locations. Using data compression techniques, files can be transferred
faster and save storage space. NUMARCK is a lossy data compression algorithm
for temporal data sets that can learn emerging distributions of element-wise
change ratios along the temporal dimension and encodes them into an index table
to be concisely represented. This paper presents a parallel implementation of
NUMARCK. Evaluated with six data sets obtained from climate and astrophysics
simulations, parallel NUMARCK achieved scalable speedups of up to 8788 when
running 12800 MPI processes on a parallel computer. We also compare the
compression ratios against two lossy data compression algorithms, ISABELA and
ZFP. The results show that NUMARCK achieved higher compression ratio than
ISABELA and ZFP.Comment: 10 pages, HiPC 201
A Universal Parallel Two-Pass MDL Context Tree Compression Algorithm
Computing problems that handle large amounts of data necessitate the use of
lossless data compression for efficient storage and transmission. We present a
novel lossless universal data compression algorithm that uses parallel
computational units to increase the throughput. The length- input sequence
is partitioned into blocks. Processing each block independently of the
other blocks can accelerate the computation by a factor of , but degrades
the compression quality. Instead, our approach is to first estimate the minimum
description length (MDL) context tree source underlying the entire input, and
then encode each of the blocks in parallel based on the MDL source. With
this two-pass approach, the compression loss incurred by using more parallel
units is insignificant. Our algorithm is work-efficient, i.e., its
computational complexity is . Its redundancy is approximately
bits above Rissanen's lower bound on universal compression
performance, with respect to any context tree source whose maximal depth is at
most . We improve the compression by using different quantizers for
states of the context tree based on the number of symbols corresponding to
those states. Numerical results from a prototype implementation suggest that
our algorithm offers a better trade-off between compression and throughput than
competing universal data compression algorithms.Comment: Accepted to Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing special
issue on Signal Processing for Big Data (expected publication date June
2015). 10 pages double column, 6 figures, and 2 tables. arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:1405.6322. Version: Mar 2015: Corrected a
typ
Optimizing Lossy Compression Rate-Distortion from Automatic Online Selection between SZ and ZFP
With ever-increasing volumes of scientific data produced by HPC applications,
significantly reducing data size is critical because of limited capacity of
storage space and potential bottlenecks on I/O or networks in writing/reading
or transferring data. SZ and ZFP are the two leading lossy compressors
available to compress scientific data sets. However, their performance is not
consistent across different data sets and across different fields of some data
sets: for some fields SZ provides better compression performance, while other
fields are better compressed with ZFP. This situation raises the need for an
automatic online (during compression) selection between SZ and ZFP, with a
minimal overhead. In this paper, the automatic selection optimizes the
rate-distortion, an important statistical quality metric based on the
signal-to-noise ratio. To optimize for rate-distortion, we investigate the
principles of SZ and ZFP. We then propose an efficient online, low-overhead
selection algorithm that predicts the compression quality accurately for two
compressors in early processing stages and selects the best-fit compressor for
each data field. We implement the selection algorithm into an open-source
library, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solution against
plain SZ and ZFP in a parallel environment with 1,024 cores. Evaluation results
on three data sets representing about 100 fields show that our selection
algorithm improves the compression ratio up to 70% with the same level of data
distortion because of very accurate selection (around 99%) of the best-fit
compressor, with little overhead (less than 7% in the experiments).Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, first revisio
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