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"SZIP is a patented compression technology used extensively by NASA. Generally you only have to worry about this if you’re exchanging files with people who use satellite data. Because of patent licensing restrictions, many installations of HDF5 have the compressor (but not the decompressor) decompressor, but compressor is disabled."

Code Block
dset= myfile.create_dataset("Dataset3", (1000,), compression="szip")

SZIP features:

  • Integer (1, 2, 4, 8 byte; signed/unsigned) and floating-point (4/8 byte) types only
  • Fast compression and decompression
  • A decompressor that is almost always available

LZF

Lempel-Ziv dynamic dictionary compression

LibLZF by Marc Lehmann is designed to be a very small, very fast, very portable data compression library for the LZF compression algorithm.

"For files you’ll only be using from Python, LZF is a good choice. It ships with h5py; C source code is available for third-party programs under the BSD license. It’s optimized for very, very fast compression at the expense of a lower compression ratio compared to GZIP. The best use case for this is if your dataset has large numbers of redundant data points."

...

  • Works with all HDF5 types
  • Fast compression and decompression
  • Is only available in Python (ships with h5py); C source available

Extra filters in HDF5

SHUFFLE

Treats low and high bytes separately

Code Block
>>> dset = myfile.create_dataset("Data", shape=(32,185,388), dtype=np.int16, chunks=(1,185,388), compression="gzip",
shuffle=True)
SHUFFLE features:
  • Available with all HDF5 distributions
  • Very fast (negligible compared to the compression time)
  • Only useful in conjunction with filters like GZIP or LZF

FLETCHER32 Filter

Check-sum

Code Block
dset = myfile.create_dataset("Data2", shape=(32,185,388), dtype=np.int16, chunks=(1,185,388), fletcher32=True, ...)
>>> dset.fletcher32
True

FLETCHER32 features:

  • Available with all HDF5 distributions
  • Very fast
  • Compatible with all lossless filters

 

Code Block
titlegzip, szip, lzf compression results
gzip default compression_opts level=4
  raw:  gzip  t1(create)=0.003280(sec)  t2(+save)=0.216324(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=1.583  shuffle=False  fletcher32=False
  raw:  gzip  t1(create)=0.003025(sec)  t2(+save)=0.146706(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=1.958  shuffle=True   fletcher32=False

calib:  gzip  t1(create)=0.002738(sec)  t2(+save)=0.168040(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=2.072  shuffle=False  fletcher32=False
calib:  gzip  t1(create)=0.002926(sec)  t2(+save)=0.178174(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=2.188  shuffle=True   fletcher32=False
calib:  gzip  t1(create)=0.002579(sec)  t2(+save)=0.182965(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=2.187  shuffle=True   fletcher32=True


calib:  lzf  t1(create)=0.003225(sec)  t2(+save)=0.100822(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=1.351  shuffle=False  fletcher32=False
calib:  lzf  t1(create)=0.002815(sec)  t2(+save)=0.086916(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=1.473  shuffle= True  fletcher32=False
  raw:  lzf  t1(create)=0.003125(sec)  t2(+save)=0.108339(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=1.045  shuffle=False  fletcher32=False
  raw:  lzf  t1(create)=0.003071(sec)  t2(+save)=0.075530(sec)  input size=4594000(byte)  ratio=1.698  shuffle= True  fletcher32=False

Compression filter "szip" is unavailable
Compression filter "lzo" is unavailable
Compression filter "blosc" is unavailable
Compression filter "bzip2" is unavailable

 

References

Igor's compressor

https://pswww.slac.stanford.edu/svn-readonly/psdmrepo/

Compressor designated for LCLS detector uint16 data:

  1. estimates dataset spread,
  2. use 16-bit and 8-bit words to save data.  

Features

  • Optimized to work with 16-bit detector data only (not with xtc or hdf5 files containing metadata).
  • By design Hist16 compression factor ≤2.
  • Single array of data is split and processed in multi-threads (inside compression algorithm).
  • Igor statement: up to ~two order of magnitude faster than gzip.
  • Igor thinks that further specialization of data (separation of signal and background regions between threads) may  improve compression factor.

Matt's Hist16 and HistN compressors

Available in external package pdsdata/compress/

  1. Hist16 - the same as Igor's compressor, but does not use multi-threading  - slow
  2. HistN - developed by Matt, uses 16-bit and 8,7,6...-bit words, compression factor HistN upto ~2.

SZ compressor from Argonne

https://github.com/disheng222/SZ

-> Clone or download -> Download ZIP -> installed under ~/lib/sz/sz-1.4.9/

Run tests like:

~/lib/sz/sz-1.4.9/SZ-master/example]$ ./testfloat_compress sz.config testdata/x86/testfloat_8_8_128.dat 8 8 128

  • works with float and double.
  • int16 and uint16 not implemented

compression factors ~ 56, 110, and 49 for  
- testfloat_8_8_128.dat,
- testdouble_8_8_128.dat, and 
- testdouble_8_8_8_128.dat, respectively.
 

But for data with VERY NARROW SPECTRA:

 testfloat_8_8_128.txt            mean=1.000000  std=1.232407
testdouble_8_8_128.txt       mean=1.000000  std=1.254261
testdouble_8_8_8_128.txt  mean=1.300935   std=0.502083

References