SPEC’s 26th Annual and Joint Meeting held in conjunction with ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), was founded in 1988 by a small number of workstation vendors who realized that the marketplace was in desperate need of realistic, standardized performance tests. The key realization was that an ounce of honest data was worth more than a pound of marketing hype.

SPEC has grown to become one of the more successful performance standardization bodies with more than 60 member companies. SPEC publishes several hundred different performance results each quarter spanning a variety of system performance discipline.  For more information, contact SPEC Headquarters via info@spec.org.

SPEC welcomes interested conference attendees who would like to attend the co-located SPEC subcommittee meetings as guests for free. Please register online. If you have questions, e-mail info(at)spec(dot)org or contact Ms. Dianne Rice on site during the conference.

SPEC’s Annual and Joint Meetings provide the perfect venue for the SPEC Groups to meet at the same time. The Annual Meeting covers the 2014 year’s activities and future plans, reports from the SPEC President, its Treasurer and Editor, plus election of SPEC’s Board of Directors.   The Board Meeting follows and is open to all to attend.

SPEC Research Group (RG) serves as a platform for collaborative research efforts in the area of quantitative system evaluation and analysis, fostering interaction between industry and academia. The group develops methodologies, techniques and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems. Additional information about the SPEC Research Group: research.spec.org. One of RG’s Working Groups will be meeting in Austin:

• SPEC RG's Cloud Working Group is taking a broad approach to cloud benchmarking, quantitative evaluation, and experimental analysis. The group is developing new methodological elements for gaining deeper understanding not only of cloud performance, but also of cloud operation and behavior.  For more information; go to  SPEC RG Cloud Group: research.spec.org/working-groups/rg-cloud-working-group.html

SPEC’s Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) creates standardized software to measure the performance of workstations running professional applications in CAD, 3D animation and other areas. For more details, go to www.spec.org/gwpg/. SPEC/GWPG committees are:

• SPECapc develops benchmarks for measuring performance of workstations running popular professional applications.
• SPECgpc develops SPECviewperf, a synthetic benchmark that measures graphics performance based on popular graphics-intensive applications.
• SPECwpc develops standardized tests to measure all aspects of workstation performance across a broad spectrum of applications.

The High Performance Group (HPG) provides benchmarks for comparing high-performance computing systems.  Benchmarks include SPEC ACCEL, which focuses on the performance of highly parallel compute-intensive applications using OpenCL and OpenACC hardware-acceleration standards; and SPEC MPI® 2007, which measures performance of compute-intensive applications using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware. More information can be found on this page: www.spec.org/hpg/.

SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG) focuses on component- and systems-level benchmarks.  SPEC/OSG has a wide range of benchmarks available and in development. Below is a list of the committees that will be meeting in Austin:

• OSG CPU Committee is responsible for SPEC’s CPU-intensive benchmark suites measuring processor, memory and compiler performance. The current suite is SPEC CPU2006 and the next version in development.
• OSG Cloud Committee is developing benchmarks using representative cloud workloads not covered by other OSG groups.
• OSG Handheld Committee is developing a compute-intensive benchmark for hand-held devices that can be used by device manufacturers, software vendors and application developers to test and market higher-performing products. Developers and other decision-makers, or even consumers, could use the data from benchmark testing to better evaluate the compute capabilities of available handheld devices.
• OSG JAVA Committee develops benchmark suites for testing the performance of J2EE1.2 and 1.3, Java virtual machine, and enterprise message-oriented servers.  Current benchmarks are SPECjEnterprise® 2010, which characterizes performance for Java EE 5.0 servers and supporting infrastructure such as JVM, database, CPU, disk and servers; and SPECjbb® 2013 for measuring the performance of the latest Java application features.
• OSG Power Committee develops benchmark suites designed to evaluate the power and performance characteristics of volume server-class computers.  OSG also provides the Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT) that measures and evaluates the energy efficiency of compute servers.
• OSG SFS Committee develops benchmark suites for testing storage solution performance. Its current suite, SPEC ® SFS2014, provides a standardized method for comparing performance across different vendor platforms.
• OSG Virtualization Committee develops suites for comparing virtualization performance of data center servers. Its current suite, SPECvirt_sc ® 2013, models server consolidation and measures the end-to-end performance of all system components, including hardware, virtualization platform, and the virtualized guest operating system and application software.