Analyzing the Effect of Lossy Compression on Particle Traces in Turbulent Vector Fields

Abstract

We shed light on the accuracy of particle trajectories in turbulent vector fields when lossy data compression is used. So far, data compression has been considered rather hesitantly due to supposed accuracy issues. Motivated by the observation that particle traces are always afflicted with inaccuracy, we quantitatively analyze the additional inaccuracies caused by lossy compression. In some experiments we confirm that the compression has only minor impact on the accuracy of the trajectories. Even though our experiments are not generally valid, they indicate that a more thorough analysis of the error in particle integration due to compression is necessary, and that in some cases lossy compression is valid and can significantly reduce performance limitations due to memory and communication bandwidth.