12,012 research outputs found
Indexing with coded deltas—a data compaction technique
The paper describes the coded delta scheme, which is one of the methods used by the Census Research Unit, University of Durham, for compacting the 1971 U.K. census data. It evaluates the merits and limitations of the technique in relation to the characteristics of the data set and other techniques available for compact encoding of numeric and string data
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
A Novel Rate Control Algorithm for Onboard Predictive Coding of Multispectral and Hyperspectral Images
Predictive coding is attractive for compression onboard of spacecrafts thanks
to its low computational complexity, modest memory requirements and the ability
to accurately control quality on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Traditionally,
predictive compression focused on the lossless and near-lossless modes of
operation where the maximum error can be bounded but the rate of the compressed
image is variable. Rate control is considered a challenging problem for
predictive encoders due to the dependencies between quantization and prediction
in the feedback loop, and the lack of a signal representation that packs the
signal's energy into few coefficients. In this paper, we show that it is
possible to design a rate control scheme intended for onboard implementation.
In particular, we propose a general framework to select quantizers in each
spatial and spectral region of an image so as to achieve the desired target
rate while minimizing distortion. The rate control algorithm allows to achieve
lossy, near-lossless compression, and any in-between type of compression, e.g.,
lossy compression with a near-lossless constraint. While this framework is
independent of the specific predictor used, in order to show its performance,
in this paper we tailor it to the predictor adopted by the CCSDS-123 lossless
compression standard, obtaining an extension that allows to perform lossless,
near-lossless and lossy compression in a single package. We show that the rate
controller has excellent performance in terms of accuracy in the output rate,
rate-distortion characteristics and is extremely competitive with respect to
state-of-the-art transform coding
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