401.bzip2
SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark Description

Benchmark Name

401.bzip2

Benchmark Author

Julian Seward <jseward [at] acm.org>

Benchmark Program General Category

Compression

Benchmark Description

401.bzip2 is based on Julian Seward's bzip2 version 1.0.3. The only difference between bzip2 1.0.3 and 401.bzip2 is that SPEC's version of bzip2 performs no file I/O other than reading the input. All compression and decompression happens entirely in memory. This is to help isolate the work done to only the CPU and memory subsystem.

Input Description

401.bzip2's reference workload has six components: two small JPEG images, a program binary, some program source code in a tar file, an HTML file, and a "combined" file, which is representative of an archive that contains both highly compressible and not very compressible files.

Each input set is compressed and decompressed at three different blocking factors ("compression levels"), with the end result of the process being compared to the original data after each decompression step.

Output Description

The output files provide a brief outline of what the benchmark is doing as it runs. Output sizes for each compression and decompression are printed to facilitate validation, and the results of decompression are compared with the input data to ensure that they match.

Programming Language

ANSI C

Known portability issues

None

References

• Michael Burrows and D. J. Wheeler: "A block-sorting lossless data compression algorithm" 10th May 1994. Digital SRC Research Report 124.
  ftp://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/pub/dec/SRC/research-reports/SRC-124.pdf
• Daniel S. Hirschberg and Debra A. LeLewer, "Efficient Decoding of Prefix Codes", Communications of the ACM, April 1990, Vol 33, # 4.
• David J. Wheeler, Program bred3.c and accompanying document bred3.ps.
  Formerly available from ftp://ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/djw3/
• Jon L. Bentley and Robert Sedgewick, "Fast Algorithms for Sorting and Searching Strings", Available from Sedgewick's web page,
  http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/
• Peter Fenwick, "Block Sorting Text Compression -- Final Report", The University of Auckland, Department of Computer Science Report No. 130, April 1996.
  http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~peter-f/FTPfiles/TechRep130.ps

Last updated: $Date: 2011-08-16 18:23:17 -0400 (Tue, 16 Aug 2011) $