The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

SPEC Organizational Information

• Background
• Philosophy
• Structure
• Comments
• Contacts
• FAQ

SPEC's Background

The System Performance Evaluation Cooperative (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 40 member companies. SPEC publishes several hundred different performance results each quarter spanning across a variety of system performance disciplines.

SPEC's Philosophy

The goal of SPEC is to ensure that the marketplace has a fair and useful set of metrics to differentiate candidate systems. The path chosen is an attempt to balance between requiring strict compliance and allowing vendors to demonstrate their advantages. The belief is that a good test that is reasonable to utilize will lead to a greater availability of results in the marketplace.

The basic SPEC methodology is to provide the benchmarker with a standardized suite of source code based upon existing applications that has already been ported to a wide variety of platforms by its membership. The benchmarker then takes this source code, compiles it for the system in question and then can tune the system for the best results. The use of already accepted and ported source code greatly reduces the problem of making apples-to-oranges comparisons.

SPEC's Structure

SPEC is a non-profit corporation whose membership is open to any company or organization that is willing to support our goals (and pay our nominal dues).

Originally just a bunch people from workstation vendors devising CPU metrics, SPEC has evolved into an umbrella organization encompassing three diverse groups.

The Open Systems Group (OSG)

The OSG is the original SPEC committee. This group focuses on benchmarks for high-end workstations and servers running open systems environments.

OSG Subcommittees:

CPU

The people who brought you SPECmarks and the other CPU benchmarks (SPECint, SPECfp, SPECrates, etc).

JAVA

The people who brought you JVM98, the Java Virtual Machine benchmark.

SDM

Makers of SDET and Kenbus1, the multi-user UN*X commands benchmarks.

SFS

These are the people who brought you SFS93 (LADDIS), SFS97, and are working on other file server benchmarks.

WEB

These are the people who brought you WEB96 and WEB99, the web server benchmarks.

The High-Performance Group (HPG)

The HPG is a forum for establishing, maintaining and endorsing a suite of benchmarks that represent high-performance computing applications for standardized, cross-platform performance evaluation.

These benchmarks target high performance system architectures, such as symmetric multiprocessor systems, workstation clusters, distributed memory parallel systems, and traditional vector and vector parallel supercomputers.

The Graphics Performance Characterization Group (GPC)

The GPC joined SPEC in early '96. They have already made a name for themselves in the area of standarized graphics performance tests.

GPC Project Groups

SPECapc

The Application Performance Characterization project group, working on broad-ranging set of standardized benchmarks for graphics-intensive applications.

SPECmedia

The Multimedia Benchmark Committee project group, working on developing standardized benchmarks for the following technologies: MPEG-2 encoding, speech recognition, 3D positional sound, 3D entertainment-oriented graphics, and multimedia Java-enabled Web pages.

SPECopc

The OpenGL Performance Characterization project group, working on ways of characterizing performance using the OpenGL application programming interface. Recent developments include the Viewperf benchmark.

SPEC Welcomes Comments

SPEC is interested in learning how we are serving the needs for performance information. We have a comments form on this server, or just send mail to "comments@spec.org".

SPEC Contacts

Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

• Address
  10754 Ambassador Drive
  Suite 201
  Manassas, VA 20109

• Phone
  703/331-0180
  703/331-0181 FAX

• Email
  info@spec.org

For a more complete list of SPEC addresses, contacts, and personel see the full contact list.

Other Performance Groups

SPEC is not the only people doing performance, we've started a small list of related performance links.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you are still curious, perhaps we have the answers in the SPEC FAQ Sheet.

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