Bug#645380: RFP: par2-tbb -- it's awesome

[Alain Kelder <debian@ak4life.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

The currently packaged par2 program is great, but it is single threaded. It'd be great if the multi threaded version was available as an alternative to the single threaded version.

  Package name    : par2-tbb
  Version         : 20100203
  Upstream Author : chuchusoft <chuchusoft@gmail.com>
  URL             : http://chuchusoft.com/par2_tbb/
  License         : GPL
  Programming Lang: C++ (I think)
  Description     : This is a concurrent (multithreaded) version of par2cmdline 0.4, a utility to create and repair data files using Reed Solomon coding. par2 parity archives are commonly used on Usenet postings to allow corrupted postings to be repaired instead of needing the original poster to repost the corrupted file(s).

This version has been modified to utilise the Intel Threading Building Blocks 2.2 library, which enables it to process files concurrently instead of the original version's serial processing. Computers with more than one CPU or core such as those using Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, or AMD Athlon X2 CPUs can now create or repair par2 archives much quicker than the original version. For example, dual core machines can achieve near-double performance when creating or repairing.

The licensing of this source code is under the GPLv2 (or later).

There is also an experimental version of the par2_tbb program which has been further modified to utilise NVIDIA CUDA 2.0 technology, which enables it to process data using the processor (GPU) on certain video cards. Most of the processing is still performed by the computer's CPU but some will be offloaded to the video card's GPU.