Lossy Data Compression with DCT Transforms

In today's computers, disks are the slowest among the performance bottlenecks presented by a computer. In order to overcome their limitations, researchers/developers must re-engineer their codes to save less often data to disk and to reduce the amount of saved data. This paper focuses on overcoming the limitations imposed by the local disk in terms of transfer time and total size of the resulting input/output (I/O) operations. To do this, we have developed a variation of a well-known family of image compression algorithms (Discrete Cosine Transform), that have already proved their properties in terms of image bandwidth compression and precision. By using this compression scheme, we are able to perform the simulation without having to use additional techniques as check-pointing, or random boundaries. We show that, with a well-designed compression algorithm, the time to the result can be dramatically reduced, as well as the disk required to process it. Finally, we show the comparison of a raw industrial, synthetic shot compared to that processed with our scheme, showing that the differences among them are affordable whilst the compression ratio obtained is considerable.