pFPC: A Parallel Compressor for Floating-Point Data

Abstract

This paper describes and evaluates pFPC, a parallel implementation of the lossless FPC compression algorithm for 64-bit floating-point data. pFPC can trade off compression ratio for throughput. For example, on a 4-core 3 GHz Xeon system, it compresses our nine datasets by 18% at a throughput of 1.36 gigabytes per second and by 41% at a throughput of 570 megabytes per second. Decompression is even faster. Our experiments show that the thread count should match or be a small multiple of the data's dimensionality to maximize the compression ratio and the chunk size should be at least equal to the system's page size to maximize the throughput.