Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

AEflow (Autoencoder fluid flow compression network) [SWR-22-29]

Software ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.11578/dc.20220216.2· OSTI ID:1845401 · Code ID:62413
 [1];  [1]
  1. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

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.

Short Name / Acronym:
AEflow
Project Type:
Open Source, Publicly Available Repository
Site Accession Number:
NREL SWR-22-29
Software Type:
Scientific
License(s):
Apache License 2.0
Programming Language(s):
Python
Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program

Primary Award/Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
Code ID:
62413
OSTI ID:
1845401
Country of Origin:
United States