Kai Zhao (https://ayzk.github.io/), Assistant Professor in the FSU Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant of $540,000 for research on scientific lossy compression. This is his first federal grant as the FSU PI, collaborating with other four professors at the University of Chicago, Indiana University, and Ohio State University. The total amount of the grant is $3.2 million.
The project, titled “Collaborative Research: Frameworks: FZ: A fine-tunable cyberinfrastructure framework to streamline specialized lossy compression development”, aims to create a framework that revolutionizes the development of specialized lossy compressors by providing a comprehensive ecosystem to enable scientific users to intuitively research, compose, implement, and test specialized lossy compressors from a library of pre-developed, high-performance data reduction modules optimized for heterogeneous platforms. The success of this project will streamline the development and use of lossy compression for scientists who require storing, transferring, or analyzing vast amounts of data in their scientific research. This project also contributes to the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students by enhancing the quality of computing-related curricula in scientific data management, compression, and visualization and through outreach activities at the four universities.