Data Reduction Techniques for Simulation, Visualization and Data Analysis

Data reduction is increasingly being applied to scientific data for numerical simulations, scientific visualizations and data analyses. It is most often used to lower I/O and storage costs, and sometimes to lower in-memory data size as well. With this paper, we consider five categories of data reduction techniques based on their information loss: (1) truly lossless, (2) near lossless, (3) lossy, (4) mesh reduction and (5) derived representations. We then survey available techniques in each of these categories, summarize their properties from a practical point of view and discuss relative merits within a category. We believe, in total, this work will enable simulation scientists and visualization/data analysis scientists to decide which data reduction techniques will be most helpful for their needs.