Plzip is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) implementation of lzip, fully
compatible with lzip 1.4 or newer. Plzip uses the compression library lzlib.

Lzip is a lossless data compressor with a user interface similar to the one
of gzip or bzip2. Lzip uses a simplified form of the 'Lempel-Ziv-Markov
chain-Algorithm' (LZMA) stream format and provides a 3 factor integrity
checking to maximize interoperability and optimize safety. Lzip can compress
about as fast as gzip (lzip -0) or compress most files more than bzip2
(lzip -9). Decompression speed is intermediate between gzip and bzip2.
Lzip is better than gzip and bzip2 from a data recovery perspective. Lzip
has been designed, written, and tested with great care to replace gzip and
bzip2 as the standard general-purpose compressed format for unix-like
systems.