Figure 11. Final-time density field of a 2D simulation of a helium bubble (dark blue) impacted by a shock using four different number representations. At only 12 bits/value in-memory storage, zfp yields a solution (bottom left) that is qualitatively identical to the ground-truth solution (top left) based on a 64-bit IEEE double-precision floating point. Using 16-bit IEEE half precision (top right) and 16-bit posits (bottom right) results in significant artifacts from rounding errors that propagate and grow over time (source). Click here to watch a movie of this process.
