libpolycomp

A C library which implements a polynomial compression, as well as other well-known compression techniques.

Building the library

You need the following dependencies:

1. A C compiler (tested compilers: GCC 4.8, Clang 3.4, Intel C compiler 16.0)
2. CMake (https://cmake.org/)
3. GNU Scientific Library (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/)
4. FFTW (http://www.fftw.org/)

Enter the directory containing the libpolycomp sources and run the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

If you need to specify custom locations for the include/library files, use CMake's variables CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH and CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH:

cmake -DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH=/myinclude -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=/mylib ..

By default, both a static and dynamic library will be compiled, with names "libpolycomp_static.a" and "libpolycomp.so". To install them system-wide, run the following command as root:

make install

If you do not want to install the library system-wide but prefer to specify a custom location, use the variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/mypolycomp ..

The source code is written using C89, so it should compile almost everywhere.

OpenMP

By default, OpenMP will be used if available. To disable OpenMP, change the cmake invocation above as follows:

# snip
cmake -DENABLE_OPENMP=OFF ..
# snip

Documentation

The documentation is kept using Doxygen, an online copy is available at the site http://ziotom78.github.io/libpolycomp .

Python bindings

A set of Python 3 bindings, as well as a stand-alone executable which implements compression/decompression of FITS files, is available here: https://github.com/ziotom78/polycomp

How to cite this library

If you use this library in your work, please cite the paper Polycomp: efficient and configurable compression of astronomical timelines (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ascom.2016.04.004):

@article{Tomasi201688,
	title = "Polycomp: Efficient and configurable compression of astronomical timelines",
	journal = "Astronomy and Computing",
	volume = "16",
	number = "",
	pages = "88-98",
	year = "2016",
	issn = "2213-1337",
	doi = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ascom.2016.04.004",
	author = "M. Tomasi",
}

License

The code is released under the MIT license.