README.md

Asterix

What is this about?

This is the prototyping repo for the Asterix project. We develop and showcase prototype methods for compressing VDFs in Vlasiator. So far this has been happening in our shared jupyter notebook Inno4Scale.ipynb.
Currently we utilize the following methods:

• Zlib lossless compression.
• ZFP lossy compression.
• Using a Multi Layer Perceptron [MLP] to train on and compress VDFs.
• Using a Multi Layer Perceptron as above enriched with Fourier Features.
• Using a Convolutional Neural Network.
• Using a Gaussian Mixture Model.
• Using a Hermite Decomposition.
• Using a Spherical Harmonic Decomposition.

Requirements

• Cargo instructions
• Maturin GitHub repo
• pyzfp instructions
• zlib (distro-dependent)
• Python >3.7
• Pytorch instructions
• Analysator GitHub Repo

Running the Project

The MLP used, is hosted in this repo and is written in Rust. To use it from python we just need to build a shared library that wraps over it. Thankfully this is not too hard to do!

• Do a pip install -r requirements.txt to get all the needed packages.
• Inside your virtual environment you can build the project with maturin develop --release.
• Open up the notebook Inno4Scale.ipynb and have fun.
• With each fresh commit we try to maintain a PDF form of the notebook under pdf/.
• On a modern system with an NVIDIA GPU running the full notebook should take less than 3 minutes.