Deep Learning for in-situ Data Compression of Large Turbulent Flow Simulations

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

39 Scopus Citations

Abstract

As the size of turbulent flow simulations continues to grow, in situ data compression is becoming increasingly important for visualization, analysis, and restart checkpointing. For these applications, single-pass compression techniques with low computational and communication overhead are crucial. In this paper we present a deep-learning approach to in situ compression using an autoencoder architecture that is customized for three-dimensional turbulent flows and is well suited for contemporary heterogeneous computing resources. The autoencoder is compared against a recently introduced randomized single-pass singular value decomposition (SVD) for three different canonical turbulent flows: decaying homogeneous isotropic turbulence, a Taylor-Green vortex, and turbulent channel flow. Our proposed fully convolutional autoencoder architecture compresses turbulent flow snapshots by a factor of 64 with a single pass, allows for arbitrarily sized input fields, is cheaper to compute than the randomized single-pass SVD for typical simulation sizes, performs well on unseen flow configurations, and has been made publicly available. The results reported here show that the autoencoder dramatically outperforms a randomized single-pass SVD with similar compression ratio and yields comparable performance to a higher-rank decomposition with an order of magnitude less compression in regard to preserving a number of important statistical quantities such as turbulent kinetic energy, enstrophy, and Reynolds stresses.

Original languageAmerican English
Article numberArticle No. 114602
Number of pages23
JournalPhysical Review Fluids
Volume5
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - 11 Nov 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Physical Society.

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/JA-2C00-75626

Keywords

  • computational fluid dynamics
  • data compression
  • deep learning

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Deep Learning for in-situ Data Compression of Large Turbulent Flow Simulations'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this