Compressing Control System Data for Efficient Storage and Retrieval
Christopher Larrieu · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2003
The controls group at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), acquires multiple terabytes of EPICS control system data per year via CZAR, its new archiving system. By heuristically applying a combination of rudimentary compression techniques, in conjunction with several specialized data transformations and algorithms, the CZAR storage engine reduces the size of this data by approximately 88 percent, without any loss of information. While the compression process requires significant memory and processor time, the decompression routine suffers only slightly in this regard.