Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Underwood, Robert.
SF-25-127AdaParse (Adaptive Parallel PDF Parsing and Resource Scaling Engine) enables scalable, high-accuracy PDF parsing. AdaParse is a data-driven strategy that assigns an appropriate parser to each document, offering high accuracy for any computational budget. Moreover, it offers a workflow of various PDF parsing software that includes extraction tools: PyMuPDF, pypdf traditional OCR: Tesseract, modern OCR (e.g., Vision Transformers): Nougat and Marker
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.
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.
Abstract We thank the authors for this interesting paper that highlights important ideas and concepts for the future of climate model ensembles and their storage, as well as future uses of stochastic emulators. Stochastic emulators are particularly relevant because of the statistical nature of climate model ensembles, as discussed in previous work of the authors (Castruccio et al. in J Clim 32:8511–8522, 2019; Hu and Castruccio in J Clim 34:8409–8418, 2021). We thank the authors for sharing of some of their data with us in order to illustrate this discussion. In the following, in Sect. 1 we discuss alternative techniques currently used and studied, namely lossy compression and ideas emerging from the climate modeling community, that could feed the discussion on ensemble and storage. In that section, we also present numerical results of compression performed on the data shared by the authors. In Sect. 2, we discuss the current statistical model proposed by the authors and its context. We discuss other potential uses of stochastic emulators in climate and Earth modeling.
Today's scientific simulations require a significant reduction of data volume because of extremely large amounts of data they produce and the limited I/O bandwidth and storage space. Here, error-bounded lossy compression has been considered one of the most effective solutions to the above problem. In practice, however, the best-fit compression method often needs to be customized or optimized in particular because of diverse characteristics in different datasets and various user requirements on the compression quality and performance. In this paper, we address this issue with a novel modular, composable compression framework named SZ3. Our contributions are four-folds. (1) We develop SZ3 which features an innovative modular abstraction for the prediction-based compression framework, such that compression modules can be plugged in easily to create new compressors based on characteristics of data and user requirements. (2) We create a new compression pipeline by SZ3 for GAMESS data, which significantly improves the compression ratios over state-of-the-art compressors. (3) We develop an adaptive compression pipeline by SZ3 for APS data with minimal efforts, which leads to the best rate-distortion among all existing error-bounded lossy compressors for any bit-rate. (4) We compare the sustainability of SZ3 with leading error-bounded prediction-based compressors, and then demonstrate the necessity of diverse pipelines by integrating and evaluating several compression pipelines on diverse scientific datasets from multiple disciplines. Experiments show that SZ3 incurs very limited overhead in compressor integration and our customized compression pipelines lead to up to 20% improvement in compression ratios under the same data distortion, when compared with the best existing approach.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Lossless compressors have very low compression ratios that do not meet the needs of today's large-scale scientific applications that produce vast volumes of data. Error-bounded lossy compression (EBLC) is considered a critical technique for the success of scientific research. Although EBLC allows users to set an error bound for the compression, users have been unable to specify the requirements on the compression quality, limiting practical use. Our contributions are: (1) We formulate the problem of configuring EBLC to preserve a user-defined metric as an optimization problem. This allows many classes of new metrics to be preserved, which improves over current practices. (2) We present a framework, OptZConfig, that can adapt to improvements in the search algorithm, compressor, and metrics with minimal changes, enabling future advancements in this area. (3) We demonstrate the advantages of our approach against the leading methods to configure compressors to preserve specific metrics. Here, our approach improves compression ratios against a specialized compressor by up to 3 x, has a 56x speedup over FRaZ, 1000x speedup over MGARD-QOI post tuning, and 110x speedup over systematic approaches which had not been bounded by compressors before.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
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.