Home Page Announcements from SPEC in 2021

December 10, 2021: The IEEE Micro Special Issue on the Microprocessor at 50 includes an article by SPEC’s John Henning, "How Many VAXes Fit in the Palms of Your Hands?" This article, and a companion video, use the original SPECmark benchmark to show relative performance on a modern system versus a system from the 1970s.

December 9, 2021: The SPECgpc® project group has released the SPECviewperf® 2020 v3.0 benchmark. The worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications, the SPECviewperf 2020 benchmark measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL and Direct X application programming interfaces.

October 28, 2021: SPEC has released the SPEChpc™ 2021 Benchmark Suites, designed to provide a comprehensive measure of real-world performance for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Offering science and engineering codes that are representative of HPC workloads and are portable across CPU and accelerators, the benchmark includes four suites, Tiny, Small, Medium, and Large, enabling fair vendor-neutral comparisons of the performance of different HPC systems, ranging from a single node to hundreds of nodes with support multiple programming models, including MPI, MPI+OpenACC, MPI+OpenMP, and MPI+OpenMP with target offload.

October 4, 2021: U.S. EPA adopts SPEC’s SERT® 2.0.4 Suite; The United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a memo titled "ENERGY STAR Computer Servers SERT V2.0.4 Clarification Memo" clarifying that certifying to the ENERGY STAR Version 3.0 Computer Servers Program shall require using the newly updated SERT 2.0.4 Suite from this point forward.

September 14, 2021: SPEC’s Call for nominations for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2021. The program is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2020 and September 2021. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2021.

September 14, 2021: SPEC has released the SPECvirt® Datacenter 2021 benchmark, a multi-host benchmark using simulated and real-life workloads to measure the overall efficiency of virtualization solutions and their management environments.

June 23, 2021: The SPECgpc® project group has released the SPECviewperf® 2020 v2.0 benchmark, with an updated SOLIDWORKS-06 viewset that uses the same viewport rendering modes in both 4K and 2K resolutions. In addition, viewsets are now individually downloaded and may be independently installed and removed using the new “Manage Viewsets” utility.

June 15, 2021: SPEC releases a new ISO-compliant version of the SERT® suite, which forms the core of the ISO/IEC 21836:2020 standard. This next-generation measurement standard was designed in collaboration with leaders of global energy-efficiency regulatory programs. The SERT 2.0.4 Suite supports certification of the latest ARM, Power, and x86 architectures driving global regulatory energy goals.

April 29, 2021: The SPEC CPU® v8 Search Program has extended the deadline for submitting applications that could potentially be used in the next CPU-intensive benchmark suite until February 2022.

March 24, 2021: SPEC has announced the winners of the 2021 SPEC Achievement Awards and 2020 Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award.

March 17, 2021: The SPECwpc® project group has released an updated version of the SPECworkstation® 3.1 benchmark, which measures all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications.

March 16, 2021: An update to the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark is available. This update includes support for macOS arm64, updates to benchmarks, the PTDaemon® tool, the presubmission tools, and more. Details can be found in the list of changes in version 1.1.7.

March 16, 2021: Systems Benchmarking For Scientists and Engineers, a new textbook on the topic of systems benchmarking written by SPEC RG Members, is available from Springer International Publishing.

March 9, 2021: The SPECapc® project group has released a new benchmark for workstations running SOLIDWORKS 2021. The new benchmark includes 10 models and 50 tests exercising a full range of graphics and CPU functionality.