Future Directions

zfp is actively being developed and plans have been made to add a number of important features, including:

  • Tagging of missing values. zfp currently assumes that arrays are dense, i.e., each array element stores a valid numerical value. In many science applications this is not the case. For instance, in climate modeling, ocean temperature is not defined over land. In other applications, the domain is not rectangular but irregular and embedded in a rectangular array. Such examples of sparse arrays demand a mechanism to tag values as missing or indeterminate. Current solutions often rely on tagging missing values as NaNs or special, often very large sentinel values outside the normal range, which can lead to poor compression and complete loss of accuracy in nearby valid values. See FAQ #7.
  • Support for NaNs and infinities. Similar to missing values, some applications store special IEEE floating-point values that are supported by zfp only in reversible mode. In fact, for all lossy compression modes, the presence of such values will currently result in undefined behavior and loss of data for all values within a block that contains non-finite values.
  • Support for more general data types. zfp currently does not directly support half and quad precision floating point. Nor is there support for 8- and 16-bit integers. With the emergence of new number representations like posits and bfloat16, we envision the need for a more general interface and a single unified zfp representation that would allow for conversion between zfp and any number representation. We are working on developing an uncompressed interchange format that acts like an intermediary between zfp and other number formats. This format decouples the zfp compression pipeline from the external number type and allows new number formats to be supported via user-defined conversion functions to and from the common interchange format.
  • Progressive decompression. Streaming large data sets from remote storage for visualization can be time consuming, even when the data is compressed. Progressive streaming allows the data to be reconstructed at reduced precision over the entire domain, with quality increasing progressively as more data arrives. The low-level bit stream interface already supports progressive access by interleaving bits across blocks (see FAQ #13), but zfp lacks a high-level API for generating and accessing progressive streams.
  • Parallel compression. zfp’s data partitioning into blocks invites opportunities for data parallelism on multithreaded platforms by dividing the blocks among threads. An OpenMP implementation of parallel compression is available that produces compressed streams that are identical to serially compressed streams. However, parallel decompression is not yet supported. zfp also supports compression and decompression on the GPU via CUDA. However, only fixed-rate mode is so far supported.
  • Variable-rate arrays. zfp currently offers only fixed-rate compressed arrays with random-access write support; zfp 1.0.0 further provides read-only variable-rate arrays. Fixed-rate arrays waste bits in smooth regions with little information content while too few bits may be allocated to accurately preserve sharp features such as shocks and material interfaces, which tend to drive the physics in numerical simulations. A candidate solution has been developed for variable-rate arrays that support read-write random access with modest storage overhead. We expect to release this capability in the near future.
  • Array operations. zfp’s compressed arrays currently support basic indexing and initialization, but lack array-wise operations such as arithmetic, reductions, etc. Some such operations can exploit the higher precision (than IEEE-754) supported by zfp, as well as accelerated blockwise computations that need not fully decompress and convert the zfp representation to IEEE-754.
  • Language bindings. The main compression codec is written in C89 to facilitate calls from other languages. zfp’s compressed arrays, on the other hand, are written in C++. zfp 0.5.4 and 0.5.5 add C wrappers around compressed arrays and Fortran and Python bindings to the high-level C API. Work is planned to provide additional language bindings for C, C++, Fortran, and Python to expose the majority of zfp’s capabilities through all of these programming languages.

Please contact us with requests for features not listed above.