GZip Application

This section presents brief introduction about GZip application and step by step guidelines to build and deployment.

Overview

GZip is an Open Source data compression library* which provides high compression ratio compared to Limpel Ziev based data compression algorithms (Byte Compression). It applies two levels of compression,

• Byte Level (Limpel Ziev LZ Based Compression Scheme)
• Bit Level (Huffman Entropy)

Due to its high compression ratio it takes higher precedence over LZ based compression schemes. Traditionally the CPU based solutions are limited to MB/s speed but there is a high demand for accelerated GZip which provides throughput in terms of GB/s.

This demo is aimed at showcasing Xilinx Alveo U250 acceleration of GZip for both compression and decompression, it also supports Zlib with a host argument switch.

Tested Tool: 2020.1
Tested XRT:  2020.1
Tested XSA:  xilinx_u250_xdma_201830_2

Executable Usage

This application is present under L3/demos/gzip_app/ directory. Follow build instructions to generate executable and binary.

The host executable generated is named as “xil_gzip” and it is generated in ./build directory.

Following is the usage of the executable:

1. To execute single file for compression : ./build/xil_gzip -sx ./build/xclbin_<xsa_name>_<TARGET mode>/compress_decompress.xclbin -c <input file_name>

2. To execute single file for decompression : ./build/xil_gzip -sx ./build/xclbin_<xsa_name>_<TARGET mode>/compress_decompress.xclbin -d <compressed file_name>

3. To validate single file (compress & decompress) : ./build/xil_gzip -sx ./build/xclbin_<xsa_name>_<TARGET mode>/compress_decompress.xclbin -v <input file_name>

4. To validate multiple files (compress & decompress) : ./build/xil_gzip -sx ./build/xclbin_<xsa_name>_<TARGET mode>/compress_decompress.xclbin -l <files.list>

   • <files.list>: Contains various file names with current path

The default design flow is GZIP design to run the ZLIB, enable the switch -zlib in the command line, as mentioned below: ./build/xil_gzip -sx ./build/xclbin_<xsa_name>_<TARGET mode>/compress_decompress.xclbin -c <input file_name> -zlib 1

The -sx option mentioned above is optional, you can provide path to your binary file using -sx option otherwise it will by default map to ./build/xclbin_<xsa_name>_<TARGET mode>/compress_decompress.xclbin

The usage of the generated executable is as follows:

Usage: application.exe -[-h-c-d-sx-v-l-k-id-mcr]

       --help,                    -h        Print Help Options
       --compress,                -c        Compress
       --decompress,              -d        DeCompress
       --single_xclbin,           -sx       Single XCLBIN           Default: [single]
       --compress_decompress,     -v        Compress Decompress
       --zlib,                    -zlib     [0:GZIP, 1:ZLIB]        Default: [0]
       --file_list,               -l        List of Input Files
       --cu,                      -k        CU                      Default: [0]
       --id,                      -id       Device ID               Default: [0]
       --max_cr,                  -mcr      Maximum CR              Default: [10]

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