Colin McManus SPO600

     For stage 2 of the project I built my package on the systems I plan to test on and then ran a standardized test a number of times to get a benchmark for performance that I can use to measure the impact I have with my code changes. Since I am going to be testing on both x86_64 and Aarch64 I needed to mimic the build process I followed in stage 1 to have ssdeep on all required systems. First up was Aarchie, after using wget to retrieve the tarball from ssdeep's website I used tar -xvf to unpack it into my project directory. From there a simple ./configure followed by make -j4 (-j4 to allow 4 concurrent jobs to run) resulted in a complete build with the ssdeep executable ready to test. My smoke test was simply calling ./ssdeep on the tarball and I was returned: ssdeep,1.1--blocksize:hash:hash,filename 12288:IvvRytd0lLS4iXBpfBof3msXd2B1mOfw68Tsd:IvZvlLS40n02st2/mOt8od,"/home/cmcmanus/proj/ssdeep-2.14.1.tar.gz"      Thus my Aarchie build passed my smoke test and it w

     For the first stage of my final project I had to select a hash, checksum or compression package to try to optimize. The package also had to compile down to machine code, like C, C++ or Assembler. Each student needed to select a different package to tackle. To keep as many possibilities for optimization open as possible, I decided to look both on Aarchie and Xerxes for packages available on both.      I began my search by dnf searching for hash checksum and compression which gave me a ton of results. After sifting through these I first thought to focus on zpaq but discovered it's archiving and journaling processes were pretty complex and difficult to read through so I moved on. Next I was going to work with spooky hash but after building and profiling it I discovered one of my classmates had beaten me to the punch.      Thus I landed on ssdeep, a program used to take input files and create a context triggered piecewise hash, or fuzzy hash. It can also compare signatures for