SPEC CPU2000 Benchmark Description File Benchmark Name: 256.bzip2 Benchmark Author: Julian Seward Benchmark Program General Category: compression Benchmark Description: 256.bzip2 is based on Julian Seward's bzip2 version 0.1. The only difference between bzip2 0.1 and 256.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: 256.bzip2's reference workload has three components: a large TIFF image, a program binary, and a source tar file. These components were selected as a reasonably representative set of things that bzip2 might most often be used on. Each input set is compressed and decompressed at two 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: $SPEC/benchspec/CINT2000/256.bzip2/src/ALGORITHMS Michael Burrows and D. J. Wheeler: "A block-sorting lossless data compression algorithm" 10th May 1994. Digital SRC Research Report 124. ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/SRC-124.ps.gz ; 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. ftp://ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk/pub/user/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, Proceedings of the 19th Australasian Computer Science Conference, Melbourne, Australia. Jan 31 - Feb 2, 1996. ftp://ftp.cs.auckland.ac.nz/pub/peter-f/ACSC96paper.ps