DE-ZFP: An FPGA implementation of a modified ZFP compression/decompression algorithm

In this work, we present DE-ZFP: a hardware implementation of modified ZFP compression and decompression algorithms on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). It can be used to accelerate applications running on a host CPU that generates large volumes of floating point data. The proposed design uses dictionary-based encoding (DE) in lieu of ZFP’s original embedded encoding to maximize hardware performance. Furthermore, the block encoder logic was optimized such that the loss of compression efficiency due to DE remains within 4%–13% of the original ZFP software implementation, with up to 19x improvement in throughput.