A methodology for evaluating the impact of data compression on climate simulation data

Autor: Sheri Mickelson, Haiying Xu, Mariana Vertenstein, Doug Nychka, Allison H. Baker, Albert W. Wegener, Jim Edwards, John M. Dennis, Michael Levy
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: HPDC
DOI: 10.1145/2600212.2600217
Popis: High-resolution climate simulations require tremendous computing resources and can generate massive datasets. At present, preserving the data from these simulations consumes vast storage resources at institutions such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The historical data generation trends are economically unsustainable, and storage resources are already beginning to limit science objectives. To mitigate this problem, we investigate the use of data compression techniques on climate simulation data from the Community Earth System Model. Ultimately, to convince climate scientists to compress their simulation data, we must be able to demonstrate that the reconstructed data reveals the same mean climate as the original data, and this paper is a first step toward that goal. To that end, we develop an approach for verifying the climate data and use it to evaluate several compression algorithms. We find that the diversity of the climate data requires the individual treatment of variables, and, in doing so, the reconstructed data can fall within the natural variability of the system, while achieving compression rates of up to 5:1.
Databáze: OpenAIRE