Preserving Clusters in Error-Bounded Lossy Compression of Particle Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ren, Congrong, Di, Sheng, Heitmann, Katrin, Cappello, Franck, Guo, Hanqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ren, Congrong
Di, Sheng
Heitmann, Katrin
Cappello, Franck
Guo, Hanqi
author_facet Ren, Congrong
Di, Sheng
Heitmann, Katrin
Cappello, Franck
Guo, Hanqi
contents Lossy compression is widely used to reduce storage and I/O costs for large-scale particle datasets in scientific applications such as cosmology, molecular dynamics, and fluid dynamics, where clustering structures (e.g., single-linkage or Friends-of-Friends) are critical for downstream analysis; however, existing compressors typically provide only pointwise error bounds on particle positions and offer no guarantees on preserving clustering outcomes, and even small perturbations can alter cluster connectivity and compromise scientific validity. We propose a correction-based technique to preserve single-linkage clustering under lossy compression, operating on decompressed data from off-the-shelf compressors such as SZ3 and Draco. Our key contributions are threefold: (1) a clustering-aware correction algorithm that identifies vulnerable particle pairs via spatial partitioning and local neighborhood search; (2) an optimization-based formulation that enforces clustering consistency using projected gradient descent with a loss that encodes pairwise distance violations; and (3) a scalable GPU-accelerated and distributed implementation for large-scale datasets. Experiments on cosmology and molecular dynamics datasets show that our method effectively preserves clustering results while maintaining competitive compression performance compared with SZ3, ZFP, Draco, LCP, and space-filling-curve-based schemes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18801
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Preserving Clusters in Error-Bounded Lossy Compression of Particle Data
Ren, Congrong
Di, Sheng
Heitmann, Katrin
Cappello, Franck
Guo, Hanqi
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Lossy compression is widely used to reduce storage and I/O costs for large-scale particle datasets in scientific applications such as cosmology, molecular dynamics, and fluid dynamics, where clustering structures (e.g., single-linkage or Friends-of-Friends) are critical for downstream analysis; however, existing compressors typically provide only pointwise error bounds on particle positions and offer no guarantees on preserving clustering outcomes, and even small perturbations can alter cluster connectivity and compromise scientific validity. We propose a correction-based technique to preserve single-linkage clustering under lossy compression, operating on decompressed data from off-the-shelf compressors such as SZ3 and Draco. Our key contributions are threefold: (1) a clustering-aware correction algorithm that identifies vulnerable particle pairs via spatial partitioning and local neighborhood search; (2) an optimization-based formulation that enforces clustering consistency using projected gradient descent with a loss that encodes pairwise distance violations; and (3) a scalable GPU-accelerated and distributed implementation for large-scale datasets. Experiments on cosmology and molecular dynamics datasets show that our method effectively preserves clustering results while maintaining competitive compression performance compared with SZ3, ZFP, Draco, LCP, and space-filling-curve-based schemes.
title Preserving Clusters in Error-Bounded Lossy Compression of Particle Data
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18801