pbzip2 only does parallel compression. lbzip2 can parallelize compression and decompression.

With both pbzip2 and lbzip2 I got errors every now and then while everything worked with bzip2. YMMV.

Also note that bzip2 is block based (due to bwt) and thus does not compromise compression ratios like parallelized gzip implantations.

At 32 cores you can saturate Gbit links (even with good compression ratios!). I hope we will see some more bzip2 love in the future due to it's perfect fit for parallelism.