Application-specific compression of large MD data preserving physical characteristics

Application areas like physics or thermodynamics often require simulations of very large data sets, up to the order of 1012 particles or even larger, to obtain results relevant for realistic industrial processes. Persisting such data is too costly, prohibiting interactive visual analysis in a classical post-processing fashion. Thus, analysis is restricted to statistical aggregation or visual in-situ exploration, both requiring an inkling of the results beforehand. We alleviate this issue by applying an application-optimized lossy compression. Reducing the size while at the same time preserving relevant physical characteristics of the data allows for accessibility on workstations and practical long-term storage. The compression is achieved by generating a density volume that is processed using wavelet decomposition, quantization and run-length encoding. Our reconstruction of particle data ensures the restoration of physically relevant properties. It employs a model based on stochastic distributions complemented by further adjustments. We evaluate the precision of the reconstruction for several data sets and a wide range of compression variants to show the effectiveness and user-adjustable trade-offs of the presented method.