Improving I/O Throughput with PRIMACY: Preconditioning ID-Mapper for Compressing Incompressibility

The ability to efficiently handle massive amounts of data is necessary for the continuing development towards exascale scientific data-mining applications and database systems. Unfortunately, recent years have shown a growing gap between the size and complexity of data produced from scientific applications and the limited I/O bandwidth available on modern high-performance computing systems. Utilizing data compression in order to lower the degree of I/O activity offers a promising means to addressing this problem. However, the standard compression algorithms previously explored for such use offer limited gains on both the end-to-end throughput and storage fronts. In this paper, we introduce an in-situ compression scheme aimed at improving end-to-end I/O throughput as well as reduction of dataset size. Our technique, PRIMACY (Preconditioning Id-MApper for Compressing incompressibility), acts as a preconditioner for standard compression libraries by modifying representation of original floating-point scientific data to increase byte-level repeatability, allowing standard loss less compressors to take advantage of their entropy-based byte-level encoding schemes. We additionally present a theoretical model for compression efficiency in high-performance computing environments and evaluate the efficiency of our approach via comparative analysis. Based on our evaluations on 20 real-world scientific datasets, PRIMACY achieved up to 38% and 22% improvements upon standard end-to-end write and read throughputs respectively in addition to a 25% increase in compression ratios paired with 3-to-4-fold improvement in both compression and decompression throughput over general purpose compressors.