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Zlib

Zlib is a free, unpatented compression library.[1]

Installed Versions

Zlib 1.2.3 is installed by default with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. No modules need to be loaded to use this.

Optimized Versions

There are at least two optimized versions of Zlib: one created by Intel[2] (available in the Intel Performance Primitives package), and another created by CloudFlare[3][4] Third-party benchmarks[5] indicate that the CloudFlare patches perform the best.

On Proteus, the CloudFlare optimizations on zlib 1.2.8 compiled with GCC and with Intel Composer XE 2015 are available. The "Intel" versions will run only on the Intel-based nodes. The GCC version will run on both Intel- and AMD-based nodes. These are the modulefiles:

zlib/cloudflare/gcc/1.2.8 zlib/cloudflare/intel/2015/1.2.8

These environment variables are defined by the modules:

ZLIBDIR = $ZLIBHOME/lib ZLIBHOME ZLIBINC = $ZLIBHOME/include

References

[1] Zlib official website

[2] Intel® IPP ZLIB Coding Functions

[3] Fighting Cancer: The Unexpected Benefit Of Open Sourcing Our Code, CloudFlare blog post by Vlad Krasnov

[4] CloudFlare zlib fork at GitHub

[5] Updated zlib benchmarks, blog post by Juho Snellman (2015-06-05) comparing zlib, zlib-cloudflare, zlib-intel, and zlib-ng