SPEC CPU2000 System Requirements

Last updated: 27 Nov 2001 cds

(To check for possible updates to this document, please see http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/docs/ )

To run and install SPEC CPU2000, you will need:
  1. A computer system running UNIX or Windows (NT-derived). (See the Portability Note below)

  2. A CD-ROM drive

  3. 256MB of RAM. Attempting to run the suite with less memory is strongly discouraged, as you will end up measuring the speed of your paging file, not the speed of your CPU.

    More memory will be needed if you run multi-user SPECrates.

  4. Disk space:

  5. Since SPEC supplies only source code for the benchmarks, you will need either:

           a. A set of compilers for the result(s) you intend to measure:
    
              1) For SPECint2000: Both C and C++ compilers
              2) For SPECfp2000:  Both C and Fortran-90 compilers
    
           --or--
    
           b. A pre-compiled set of benchmark executables, given to you
              by another user of the same revision of SPEC CPU2000, and
    	  any run-time libraries that may be required for those 
    	  executables.

    Please notice that you cannot generate a valid CPU2000 result unless you meet all of requirement 5.a.1 or 5.a.2 or 5.b. For example, if you are attempting to build the floating point suite but lack a Fortran-90 compiler, you will not be able to measure a SPECfp2000 result.

Portability Notes

SPEC CPU2000 is a source code benchmark, and portability of that source code is one of the chief goals of SPEC CPU2000. SPEC has invested substantial effort to make the benchmarks portable across a wide variety of hardware architectures, operating systems, and compilers. During the development of SPEC CPU2000 V1.0, testing was done on 7 different hardware architectures, 11 versions of Unix (including 4 Linux versions) and two versions of Windows/NT.

During the development of SPEC CPU2000 V1.2, many of these operating systems were re-tested, and in some cases newer versions of the operating systems were tested. In the Windows family, testing included Windows Advanced Server, Windows XP, and Windows 2000. (Notice that SPEC CPU2000 is not compatible with versions of Windows that are not derived from Windows NT. For example, SPEC CPU2000 cannot be expected to work on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 3.1, or Windows Me.)

Despite SPEC's testing efforts, certain portability problems are likely to arise from time to time. For example:

If you visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/ and look up results for SPEC CPU2000, you will find combinations of OS and compiler versions that are known to work. For example, if a vendor reports a SPECint2000 result on the SuperHero 4 using SuperHero Unix V4.0 with SuperHero C V4.0 and SuperHero C++ V4.0, you may take that as an assertion by the vendor that the listed versions of Unix, C, and C++ will successfully compile and run the SPEC CINT2000 suite on the listed machine.

For systems that have not (yet) been reported by vendors, SPEC can provide limited technical support to resolve portability issues. See techsupport.txt for information.


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