Abstract
Large HPC installations today also include large data storage installations. Data compression can significantly reduce the amount of data, and it was one of our goals to find out, how much compression can do for climate data. The price of compression is, of course, the need for additional computational resources, so our second goal was to relate the savings of compression to the costs it necessitates.
In this paper we present the results of our analysis of typical climate data. A lossless algorithm based on these insights is developed and its compression ratio is compared to that of standard compression tools. As it turns out, this algorithm is general enough to be useful for a large class of scientific data, which is the reason we speak of MAFISC as a method for scientific data compression. A numeric problem for lossless compression of scientific data is identified and a possible solution is given. Finally, we discuss the economics of data compression in HPC environments using the example of the German Climate Computing Center.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alfsen K, Skodvin T (2009) The intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) and scientific consensus
Bosi M (2012) MPEG audio compression basics. In: Chiariglione L (ed) The MPEG Representation of Digital Media. Springer, New York, pp 97–123. doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-6184-6_6
Christopoulos C, Skodras A, Ebrahimi T (2000) The JPEG2000 still image coding system: an overview. IEEE Trans Consum Electron 46(4):1103–1127
Dutta S, Bhattacherjee S, Narang A (2011) Towards “intelligent compression” in streams: a biased reservoir sampling based bloom filter approach. arXiv e-prints
ECMA: Streaming lossless data compression algorithm—(sldc) (2001). ECMA Standart 321
Fenwick P (1996) The Burrows–Wheeler transform for block sorting text compression: principles and improvements. Comput J 39(9):731
Furht B (1995) A survey of multimedia compression techniques and standards. Part I: JPEG standard. Real-Time Imaging 1(1):49–67
Jain C, Chaudhary V, Jain K, Karsoliya S (2011) Performance analysis of integer wavelet transform for image compression. In: 3rd International Conference on Electronics Computer Technology (ICECT), vol 3, pp 244–246. doi:10.1109/ICECTECH.2011.5941746
Koranne S, Koranne S (2011) Hierarchical data format 5: HDF5. In: Handbook of Open Source Tools. Springer, New York, pp 191–200. doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-7719-9_10
Lakshminarasimhan S, Shah N, Ethier S, Klasky S, Latham R, Ross R, Samatova N (2011) Compressing the incompressible with ISABELA: in-situ reduction of spatio-temporal data. In: Euro-Par 2011 Parallel Processing pp. 366–379
Latham R (2010) The parallel-netCDF I/O library
Nagaraj N, Vaidya P, Bhat K (2009) Arithmetic coding as a non-linear dynamical system. Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simul 14(4):1013–1020
Rockel B, Will A, Hense A (2008) The regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM). Meteorol Z 17(4):347–348
Szalay A (2011) Extreme data-intensive scientific computing. Comput Sci Eng 13(6):34–41. doi:10.1109/MCSE.2011.74
Taylor KE, Stouffer RJ, Meehl GA (2007) A summary of the CMIP5 experiment design. World 4 (January 2011), 1–33. http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/docs/Taylor_CMIP5_design.pdf
Woodring J, Mniszewski S, Brislawn C, DeMarle D, Ahrens J (2011) Revisiting wavelet compression for large-scale climate data using JPEG2000 and ensuring data precision. In: IEEE symposium on large data analysis and visualization (LDAV), pp 31–38. doi:10.1109/LDAV.2011.6092314
Acknowledgements
We want to thank Wolfgang Stahl for his measurements of the tape drive compression ratio at the DKRZ and the fruitful discussion about compression impact on HPC installations.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hübbe, N., Kunkel, J. Reducing the HPC-datastorage footprint with MAFISC—Multidimensional Adaptive Filtering Improved Scientific data Compression. Comput Sci Res Dev 28, 231–239 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0222-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0222-4