ZHW: A Numerical CODEC for Big Data Scientific Computation

Abstract

Distributed big data in scientific computing presents a major I/O performance bottleneck when exploiting data paral-lelism. Consumer and producer compute nodes are often throttled by saturated data channels when processing large numerical data. We describe ZHW, a hardware implementation of the ZFP numerical CODEC that can greatly reduce I/O pressure caused by large scientific datasets. Our ZHW design overcomes barriers that have prevented prior ZFP-like hardware accelerators from obtaining maximum compression in their implementations. The SystemC ZHW hardware library is available in an open source public repository. We demonstrate the practicality of ZHW by synthesizing our CODEC on an Ultrascale+ FPGA and analyzing performance.