QualityNet: Error-bounded Lossy Compression Quality Prediction via Deep Surrogate

As scientific simulations generate increasingly large datasets, efficient data compression becomes essential to mitigate storage and transmission challenges. Error-bounded Lossy compression algorithms reduce data volume at the expense of data fidelity. However, the evaluation of compressed data quality can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. This paper proposes a surrogate-based framework to predict key compression quality assessment metrics, allowing users to evaluate the quality of compressed data quickly without extensive trial and error. We evaluate our proposed framework on real-world scientific application datasets. Our surrogate-based framework shows superior prediction accuracy, with the RMSE generally lower than 5%. On the other hand, our framework demonstrates robust generalization for prediction across data fields within the same application. Our results show that our approach significantly reduces the error bound selection time and accelerates the downstream evaluation process for decompressed data, making it easier for domain scientists to select optimal error bounds of lossy compression while maintaining data quality that meets their needs. This work bridges the gap between compression ratio optimization and data fidelity, offering a scalable solution for scientific applications that rely on large-scale lossy compression.