FPTC: A Fast Parallel Transform-based Codec for Efficient Asymmetric Signal Compression

TL;DR

FPTC is a GPU-optimized, high-throughput asymmetric signal codec that efficiently compresses various signal types by combining a lightweight encoder with a parallel decoder, achieving superior compression ratios.

Contribution

Introduces FPTC, a novel GPU-accelerated signal compression framework that balances high throughput with improved compression ratios across multiple domains.

Findings

FPTC achieves up to 3.6x better compression on power signals.

FPTC maintains competitive throughput while outperforming existing methods in compression ratio.

Evaluations span biomedical, seismic, power-grid, and meteorological datasets.

Abstract

Modern high-performance computing and Internet-of-Things deployments increasingly generate large volumes of signal data that must be compressed efficiently on resource-constrained acquisition devices and decompressed at scale on centralized servers. Lossy compression is widely adopted to minimize storage and transmission costs on low-power hardware sensors, yet existing methods rarely optimize for both reconstruction quality and decompression throughput simultaneously, nor do they apply methods that generalize across signal domains. In this work, we introduce FPTC, a high-throughput asymmetric signal codec that pairs a lightweight sequential encoder with a massively parallel GPU decoder designed for server-side batch decompression. FPTC applies a windowed discrete cosine transform (DCT) to exploit frequency-domain sparsity, quantizes spectral coefficients with a hybrid three-zone mapping, and entropy codes the result using Huffman coding with a novel packing scheme. The pipeline used in FPTC is designed to be throughput oriented on the GPU, maximizing performance without sacrificing reconstruction quality. We evaluate FPTC on ten datasets spanning four signal domains: biomedical diagnostic, seismic reflections, power-grid production metrics, and meteorological recordings. Our results demonstrate that FPTC outperforms existing frameworks in compression ratio while maintaining competitive throughput, achieving multiplicative compression performance of 3.6x (power), 3.1x (meteorological), 1.5x (biomedical), and 1.2x (seismic) over existing frameworks.