Lessons Learned on the Path to Guaranteeing the Error Bound in Lossy Quantizers

Abstract: Rapidly increasing data sizes in scientific computing are the driving force behind the need for lossy compression. The main drawback of lossy data compression is the introduction of error. This paper explains why many error-bounded compressors occasionally violate the error bound and presents the solutions we use in LC, a CPU/GPU compatible lossy compression framework, to guarantee the error bound for all supported types of quantizers. We show that our solutions maintain high compression ratios and cause no appreciable change in throughput.