Workshops Archive

On the Compressibility of Floating-Point Data in Posit and IEEE-754 Representation

Workshop: The 11th International Workshop on Data Analysis and Reduction for Big Scientific Data

Authors: Andrew Rodriguez and Martin Burtscher (Texas State University)

Abstract: The IEEE 754 floating-point standard is the most used representation for real numbers in modern computer systems, despite issues in accuracy for certain applications. The posit format, which has several advantages, has been proposed as a direct drop-in replacement for IEEE floats. Many works compare the use of posits to floats in a wide range of scientific computing domains. However, there has not been any work looking into the compressibility of posit data. In this paper, we compare the compression ratios of different algorithms when the input is encoded in IEEE format and in posit format. We evaluate 5 lossless general-purpose compressors as well as several new compression algorithms synthesized by our LC framework, on 14 single-precision inputs from the SDRBench suite, encoded in float and posit format. Our results show that that 4 of the 6 compressors yield an average of 2.59\% reduction in compression ratio on posit data.

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