3D Gaussian Splatting for Scientific Particle Data Compression and Rendering

Large-scale particle simulations produce hundreds of millions of particles, straining storage, transfer, and interactive visualization. Existing lossy compressors such as SZ3 operate in data space and provide no guarantees on downstream visualization fidelity. We propose ParticleGS, a visualization-aware framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that learns a compact representation directly optimized for rendered image quality, combining (1) a multi-stage, multi-orbit training pipeline, (2) VizMapper, a lightweight network that adapts a single trained model to user-specified visualization parameters at inference time, and (3) spatial block training with KD-tree decomposition and global fine-tuning. On a 281-million-particle HACC cosmological simulation, our 8-block model reaches 30.03 dB PSNR at 65x compression, outperforming SZ3 by 5-8 dB at comparable ratios, and generalizes without tuning to additional HACC regions and a dark-matter-only FIRE-2 simulation. It renders at 662 FPS on a single GPU, over 2,300x faster than ParaView on the full particle data.