SMP Projects Page

Symmetric Multi-Processing

(or Symmetric Multi-Penguin)

SMP projects (currently parallel data compression programs):

SMP mgzip, a SMP capable producer of gzip compatible files
SMP lzop, a patch against lzop using your POSIX threads library
Not mine, but interesting is an SMP capable bzip2 file creator by Jeff Gilchrist. This rounds out the SMP capable general purpose compression programs - we have lzop for speed, gzip for general use and bzip2 for very tight compression, with the tradeoff being speed. If you really want to peg your CPUs for an extended period, I can think of no better program than bzip2, so a parallel version is a welcome addition to the toolkit.

Here is a quick comparison test using a 2 cpu AMD/GNU/Linux machine:


COMMAND         USER    SYSTEM  ELAPSED CPU     OUTPUT SIZE     COMPRESSION PCT
gzip -6         10.22   0.21    10.48   99%     19424601        53.69
smp_mgzip -6    11.66   0.18    06.26   189%    19597878        53.26
gzip -2         5.45    0.17    05.99   93%     21293631        49.22
smp_mgzip -2    4.84    0.11    03.22   153%    21393344        48.99
lzop            1.21    0.19    01.56   89%     25695660        38.74
smp_lzop        1.17    0.20    00.91   149%    25694156        38.74
cat             0.00    0.35    00.56   61%     41943040        0

Note that smp_lzop's compression speed was over 40 megabytes per second. Chances are good that you can compress and write a data file faster than you can write an uncompressed datafile.

Send thoughts to spambait@lemley.net only change my email name to "Dru" at the same domain (without the quotes of course).

Symmetric Multi-Processing

(or Symmetric Multi-Penguin)

SMP projects (currently parallel data compression programs):

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