The Archive Comparison Test (ACT) is a set of benchmarks designed to show the state of the art in lossless data compression. It contains benchmarks on various types of data for compression speed, uncompression speed, and compression ratio.
Parallel BZIP2 (PBZIP2) is an open-source parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines. The output of this version is fully compatible with bzip2 v1.0.2 or newer (ie: anything compressed with pbzip2 can be decompressed with bzip2). Free source code available.
Parallel MPI BZIP2 (MPIBZIP2) is an open-source parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses that uses MPI and achieves significant speedup on cluster machines. The output of this version is fully compatible with bzip2 v1.0.2 or newer (ie: anything compressed with pbzip2 can be decompressed with bzip2). Free source code available.
