Libaec provides fast lossless compression of 1 up to 32 bit wide signed or
unsigned integers (samples). The library achieves best results for low entropy
data as often encountered in space imaging instrument data or numerical model
output from weather or climate simulations. While floating point representations
are not directly supported, they can also be efficiently coded by grouping
exponents and mantissa.

Libaec implements Golomb-Rice coding as defined in the Space Data System
Standard documents 121.0-B-2 and 120.0-G-2.

Libaec includes a free drop-in replacement for the SZIP library. Just replace
SZIP's shared library libsz.so* with libaec.so* and libsz.so* from libaec. Code
which is dynamically linked with SZIP such as HDF5 should continue to work with
libaec. No re-compilation required. HDF5 files which contain SZIP encoded data
can be decoded by HDF5 using libaec and vice versa.