Hieu Trung Le

Hieu Le, Jian Tao

Lossy compression has become an important technique to reduce data size in many domains. This type of compression is especially valuable for large-scale scientific data, whose size ranges up to several petabytes. Although Autoencoder-based models have been successfully leveraged to compress images and videos, such neural networks have not widely gained attention in the scientific data domain. Our work presents a neural network that not only significantly compresses large-scale scientific data, but also maintains high reconstruction quality. The proposed model is tested with scientific benchmark data available publicly and applied to a large-scale high-resolution climate modeling data set. Our model achieves a compression ratio of 140 on several benchmark data sets without compromising the reconstruction quality. 2D simulation data from the High-Resolution Community Earth System Model (CESM) Version 1.3 over 500 years are also being compressed with a compression ratio of 200 while the reconstruction error is negligible for scientific analysis.

Hieu Le, Zhenhua He, Mai Le et al.

The discoveries in this paper show that Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) offer a viable accelerator alternative to GPUs for machine learning (ML) applications within the fields of materials science and battery research. We investigate the process of migrating a model from GPU to IPU and explore several optimization techniques, including pipelining and gradient accumulation, aimed at enhancing the performance of IPU-based models. Furthermore, we have effectively migrated a specialized model to the IPU platform. This model is employed for predicting effective conductivity, a parameter crucial in ion transport processes, which govern the performance of multiple charge and discharge cycles of batteries. The model utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to perform prediction tasks for effective conductivity. The performance of this model on the IPU is found to be comparable to its execution on GPUs. We also analyze the utilization and performance of Graphcore's Bow IPU. Through benchmark tests, we observe significantly improved performance with the Bow IPU when compared to its predecessor, the Colossus IPU.

Federico Stella, Nicolas Talabot, Hieu Le et al.

Unsigned Distance Fields (UDFs) are a natural implicit representation for open surfaces but, unlike Signed Distance Fields (SDFs), are challenging to triangulate into explicit meshes. This is especially true at high resolutions where neural UDFs exhibit higher noise levels, which makes it hard to capture fine details. Most current techniques perform within single voxels without reference to their neighborhood, resulting in missing surface and holes where the UDF is ambiguous or noisy. We show that this can be remedied by performing several passes and by reasoning on previously extracted surface elements to incorporate neighborhood information. Our key contribution is an iterative neural network that does this and progressively improves surface recovery within each voxel by spatially propagating information from increasingly distant neighbors. Unlike single-pass methods, our approach integrates newly detected surfaces, distance values, and gradients across multiple iterations, effectively correcting errors and stabilizing extraction in challenging regions. Experiments on diverse 3D models demonstrate that our method produces significantly more accurate and complete meshes than existing approaches, particularly for complex geometries, enabling UDF surface extraction at higher resolutions where traditional methods fail.