SPEC Blog
News and views about SPEC, our products, and the people in our community.
Nikki is a procurement manager at a large digital media and marketing company that offers vertical solutions for a range of industries, including media and entertainment, life sciences and ecommerce. She was tasked with purchasing over 300 new workstations to satisfy the needs of power users across the company – while staying within a finite budget.
The SPEChpc 2021 benchmark suites, a standard High-Performance Computing (HPC) test tool, proves valuable in various situations. In this blog, Nick Hagerty, HPC engineer from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Dr. Junjie Li, Research Associate from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), two of the largest HPC centers in the U.S., share their experiences with the SPEChpc 2021 Benchmark Suites in their research and daily data center operations.
A new version of the PTDaemon interface is now available. It includes multi-channel support for the ZES LMG 450/500/600 families of power analyzers and support for TFA Dostmann and Cleware USB temperature sensors on Linux-based systems. It also includes bug fixes and enhancements, enabling more organizations to use SPEC benchmarks and other tools for more use cases related to increasing energy efficiency, achieving a low carbon footprint, and implementing new cooling technologies.
Ashley, a college sophomore majoring in graphics and design, specializes in 3D modeling. Her modeling tool of choice was Autodesk Maya 2024, the latest version of the popular 3D software that both professionals and enthusiasts use to create realistic characters and blockbuster-worthy effects.
The development of the SPECaccel 2023 benchmark suite is a collaboration by representatives from industry vendors, high performance computing centers and academic institutions to provide a baseline to compare accelerator performance. While vendor supplied languages may offer optimal performance for a particular accelerator, the use of directives showcases performance portability across many accelerators.
SPEC and EEMBC combining forces will significantly further both organizations’ missions to provide global, independent and high-quality benchmarks, and provide one source for benchmarks which cover the smallest microcontroller to the largest supercomputers.
An IT Manager at a rapidly growing financial services company, needed to specify the hardware required for the company’s new private cloud deployment. He was pleased to find the SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark, which offered several benefits compared to the 2013 version – and to any of the other tools John had in his arsenal.
The benchmark has undergone a significant transformation with three major upgrades since it first released for Creo 3, and we are particularly gratified with being able to work directly with PTC on this update. In addition to new test cases that exercise features added to Creo over the last few releases, we have significantly enhanced the benchmark’s interface to make it far more user-friendly.
Emma is a tech enthusiast who develops product designs and plays games on the same workstation, which includes a CPU and GPU that were mid-range when she bought the system in 2018. She narrowed her choice down to five possibilities based on price and the brands she favored, but she obviously couldn’t afford to purchase all five and test them. She was at a bit of a loss until she noted that in several of the reviews, GPU performance comparisons were based on the SPECviewperf benchmark.