The pipeline decompressed each image on the host and uploaded the result. On an 18 Mpx rotation dataset that made the host-to-device copy the bottleneck of the whole per-image loop: nsys puts the copies at 78% of the loop against 39% for every kernel combined - 3600 transfers of 72.4 MB - and they ran at only 12.5 GB/s of an available 27-28 because the host-side decompression was itself saturating host memory bandwidth. The GPU was mostly waiting. So the compressed chunk goes across instead, about 4 MB rather than 72 MB, and is decoded on the device. That removes the transfer and the host decompression that was throttling it, in one change. Measured on an idle machine, a run goes from 45.11 s to 24.97 s - 1.81x - with the merged output unchanged. THE APPROACH IS JON WRIGHT'S (ESRF): "Experiences with GPU decompression for bitshuffle + LZ4 data", HDF5 User Group 2021, and github.com/jonwright/ bslz4decoders. The kernels here are ours, but the idea and the demonstration that it is worth doing are his. Cited in docs/ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.md and in the new section 0 of docs/CPU_DATA_ANALYSIS.md. Two kernels mirror the CPU decoder. LZ4 runs one WARP per bitshuffle block: every lane parses the same sequence stream (a broadcast read, no divergence) and the literal and match copies are split across the 32 lanes so the stores coalesce; an overlapping match is treated as a pattern of period offset sourced from bytes that already precede the write position, which keeps it parallel rather than a serial byte loop. One thread per block instead measured 13x slower. The bitshuffle inverse then un-transposes each byte-plane through shared memory and interleaves the planes back into elements. Only BSHUF_LZ4 is decoded on the device. The zstd variants have no device decoder, and neither has an uncompressed or float image; Supports() returns false for those and the caller decompresses on the host exactly as before. The fallback is explicit, so a format we cannot decode on the device is a slower path and never a wrong answer. Tests hold the device decoder against the CPU one byte for byte, on data from the production compressor, for every element size the detectors emit - including the 8-bit DECTRIS modes, which take bitshuf_decode_block's separate elem_size == 1 branch - plus a many-block frame, the formats it must decline, and malformed containers, which must throw rather than run off a buffer. Battery: 37 crystals, no failures, identical to the host-decode run. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Acknowledgements
Citation: F. Leonarski, M. Bruckner, C. Lopez-Cuenca, A. Mozzanica, H.-C. Stadler, Z. Matej, A. Castellane, B. Mesnet, J. Wojdyla, B. Schmitt and M. Wang "Jungfraujoch: hardware-accelerated data-acquisition system for kilohertz pixel-array X-ray detectors" (2023), J. Synchrotron Rad., 30, 227-234 doi:10.1107/S1600577522010268.
The project is supported by :
- Innosuisse via Innovation Project "NextGenDCU high data rate acquisition system for X-ray detectors in structural biology applications" (101.535.1 IP-ENG; Apr 2023 - Sep 2025).
- ETH Domain via Open Research Data Contribute project (Jan - Dec 2023)
- AMD University Program with donation of licenses of Ethernet IP cores and Vivado software
Decoding bitshuffle+LZ4 images on the GPU, rather than decompressing them on the host and uploading the result, follows Jon Wright (ESRF): "Experiences with GPU decompression for bitshuffle + LZ4 data", HDF5 User Group meeting (2021), and bslz4decoders. The CUDA kernels in Jungfraujoch are its own, but the approach is his.
This software uses Viridis, Magma and Inferno colormaps from Matplotlib under its BSD-compatible license