Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

News Archive

2023

June 26, 2023: RG News - Nominations for the SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award are now open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2021 and September 2023. A thesis can be nominated only once, which means that a 2022 thesis nominated in 2023 cannot be nominated again in 2024. Questions about the application process can be e-mailed to: nominations@spec.org.

February 9, 2023: The 14th International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) will be held April 15-19, 2023 in Coimbra, Portugal.

2022

December 14, 2022: The International Standards Group (ISG) has formed the Client Efficiency Committee to oversee the establishment and development of standardized client computing benchmarks for use primarily in national and international standards organizations, governmental regulations and energy efficiency programs for client computing systems. The benchmarks will focus on application types that are often used on notebooks, desktops and workstations.

December 1, 2022: The OSG CPU Committee has released version 1.1.9 of the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark suite. The new update includes: an initial toolset to enable limited usage on RISC-V architectures (reportable runs not supported at this time), improved automated system configuration gathering tools (sysinfo) and new Academic Pricing ($50). Please note, as of February 28, 2023, all SPEC CPU 2017 results submitted to SPEC must use version 1.1.9.

October 25, 2022: The International Standards Group (ISG) has formed the Server Efficiency Committee to oversee the establishment and development of standardized server benchmarks for use primarily in governmental regulations and compliance programs related to energy use and sustainability.

October 18, 2022: The SPECapc® project group has released the SPECapc® for Maya 2023 benchmark. The updated benchmark offers application performance measurement for workstations running Autodesk Maya 2023, the 3D animation and visual effects software used by top artists in the industry to create realistic characters and stunning visual effects.

September 28, 2022: The OSG CPU Committee extended the SPEC CPU® v8 Search Program deadline to March 13, 2023. The committee encourages all interested parties, whether a SPEC member or not, to submit applications to the SPEC CPU v8 Search Program so they may have a chance to be a part of the next SPEC CPU suite. For more information, please see http://www.spec.org/cpuv8.

September 27, 2022: SPEC formally announced the formation of the International Standards Group (ISG) to collaborate with international stakeholders to develop and enhance standardized server, client and datacenter benchmarks for use primarily in government regulations and compliance programs related to energy use and sustainability.

September 15, 2022: The SPECapc® project group has released the SPECapc® for Solidworks 2022 benchmark. The updated benchmark offers application performance measurement for workstations running Dassault Systèmes Solidworks 2022, the latest version of the CAD/CAM application.

August 29, 2022: SPEC's Call for nominations for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2022. The program is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2021 and September 2022. Deadline for submissions is October 21, 2022. Questions about the application process can be e-mailed to the Selection Committee.

August 11, 2022: SPEC's new Machine Learning Committee is hard at work developing practical methodologies for benchmarking artificial intelligence and machine learning performance in the context of real-world platforms and environments. Learn more on our blog.

August 4, 2022: The SPECgpc® project group has released the SPECViewperf® 2020 v3.1 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 DirectX application programming interfaces.

July 14, 2022: SPEC's High Performance Group announces the availability of the SPEChpc™ 2021 V1.1 benchmark, an incremental update to V1.0, and the SPEChpc™ Weak Scaling search program to find candidate benchmarks for an upcoming complimentary weak scaling suite. You can read more about the updated SPEChpc™ 2021 benchmark and the search program in the SPEC blog.

June 14, 2022: Check out the latest updates in the SPEC blog, including the new SPECviewperf® 2020 V3.0 benchmark with Linux support and a look at what's ahead for SPEC.

April 11, 2022: SPEC has announced the winners of the 2022 SPEC Achievement Awards.

April 6, 2022: The April 2022 issue of the SPEC Research Group newsletter is now available. This regular publication provides information on the latest developments, news, and announcements relevant to the benchmarking and quantitative system evaluation communities.

March 22, 2022: The SPECapc® project group releases the new SPECapc® for 3ds Max 2020 benchmark for workstations running Autodesk 3ds Max 2020. The new benchmark replaces the SPECapc® for 3ds Max 2015 benchmark and includes 43 tests for comprehensive measurement of CPU and GPU performance with modeling, interactive graphics and visual effects.

March 18, 2022: André Bauer from the University of Würzburg has been recognized as the winner of the 2021 Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award for his work, "Automated Hybrid Time Series Forecasting: Design, Benchmarking, and Use Cases." The award will be presented at the 13th Annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) conference in April 2022.

March 17, 2022: The 13th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) will be virtual this year and is open for registration. ICPE is also included for the first time in the CORE ranking with rank B. More details are here.

March 10, 2022: SPEC has announced the formation of the SPEC Machine Learning Committee. The new committee will develop practical methodologies for benchmarking artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) performance in the context of real-world platforms and environments.

March 3, 2022: SPECgpc® released a Linux Edition of its SPECviewperf® 2020 v3.0 performance benchmark, the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition benchmark enables hardware and software vendors and consumers to measure the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL application programming interface.

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?" The article, and a companion video, use the original SPECmark benchmark to show relative performance on a modern system vs. 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.

2020

December 15, 2020: SPEC has released an updated storage benchmark, the SPECstorage® Solution 2020 benchmark. It includes new workloads for artificial intelligence (AI) and genomics, expanded custom workload capabilities, massively better scaling, and a statistical visualization mechanism for displaying benchmark results. More details are available in "What's New in SPECstorage Solution 2020".

November 20, 2020: SPEC has released version 1.1.5 of the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark, with improvements to the sysinfo utility, better compatibility with GCC version 10, and various minor bug fixes. More details are available in "Changes in v1.1.5". All users are encouraged to update their copy by using the runcpu update option.

October 14, 2020: The SPECgpc® project group has released the SPECviewperf® 2020 benchmark, with new and updated viewsets and models, support within all viewsets for both 2K and 4K resolution displays, and numerous user interface improvements.

September 30, 2020: The SPECapc® project group has released a new benchmark for workstations running Solidworks 2020. The new benchmark includes 10 models and 50 tests exercising a full range of graphics and CPU functionality.

August 3, 2020: The 12th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, ICPE 2021, is set to be held April 19-23, 2021, in Rennes, France.

July 3, 2020: SPEC is calling for nominations for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2020. The program is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2019 and September 2020. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2020.

June 3, 2020: The serverless computing paradigm delivers major benefits for cloud applications —low-cost, fine-grained deployment, and management-free operation. Read more in this SPEC Research Group report.

May 22, 2020: Through the years, the SPECviewperf® benchmark has grown from a 55 MB download back in 2000 to a 7 GB download for the current SPECviewperf® 13 benchmark, to an estimated 18 GB download for the upcoming SPECviewperf® 2020 benchmark. Read about the full evolution of the benchmark over more than 25 years.

May 15, 2020: Accurately assessing CAD workstation performance means taking into account variances such as dataset complexity, users' most critical tasks, and how the design is affected by downstream operations within the product development cycle. A new article featuring SPEC/GWPG members.

April 20, 2020: Video presentations from the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering 2020 (ICPE 2020) are now live on YouTube!

March 20, 2020: The 11th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, scheduled for April 20-24, will not be held as planned.

February 25, 2020: The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) announces that it is offering rewards of up to $9,000 and a free benchmark license for application code and datasets accepted under its benchmark search program.

February 25, 2020: The SPECworkstation® 3 benchmark has been updated with reengineered multi-threading code, enabling certain computational workloads to scale beyond 64 logical processors.

February 24, 2020: The Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award selection committee has chosen the winning dissertation. It was authored by Guanpeng Li of University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Prof. Karthik Pattabiraman. The selection committee was especially impressed with the quality and clarity of Dr. Li's dissertation. The award will be presented at the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) in April 2020.

Given the high quality of dissertations nominated for this award, the committee decided to also publicly recognize another dissertation authored by Dr. Bin Nie under the supervision of Prof. Evgenia Smirni at the College of William & Mary as the runner-up to the award. Honorable mentions were awarded to Pamela Delgado from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), under the supervision of Prof. Willy Zwaenepoel, and Dr. Johannes Hofmann from Friedrich-Alexander Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg, under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard Wellein.

2019

December 18, 2019: SPEC/GWPG has issued its final enewsletter of the year, featuring an expert forecast of the professional workstation world in five years, a thank you to supporters, and an article by SPECapc chair Trey Morton on how benchmarks can be used to optimize CAD/CAM performance.

November 14, 2019: The SPECjbb® 2015 benchmark has been updated to version 1.03. This update fixes a rarely encountered hang. Licensees of versions 1.00, 1.01, and 1.02 are entitled to a complimentary V1.03 upgrade. SPEC will be retiring V1.02 in February 2020, after which time all result submissions must be made with V1.03.

October 23, 2019: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization (SPECapc®) project group has released new performance evaluation software for systems running Dassault Systemes' Solidworks CAD/CAM application on Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit platforms. The benchmark is available for immediate download on the SPEC website (www.spec.org/gwpg) under a two-tiered pricing structure: free for the user community and $2,500 for sellers of computer-related products and services that are not SPEC/GWPG members.

October 8, 2019: Reminder: Starting November 26, 2019, all SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark submissions to the SPEC website must use V1.1. Current licensees can upgrade their existing installations by connecting their systems to the internet and running the "runcpu --update" command. New users can purchase the benchmark on the SPEC website.

October 8, 2019: The submission deadlines for ICPE 2020 have been extended; abstract submissions are now due October 11 and paper submissions are due October 18. Workshop proposals are due October 18.

September 10, 2019: An updated version of the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark suite is now live. Version 1.1 provides full support for power measurement, clarifies run rules, and fixes minor software bugs. Current benchmark licensees can upgrade their existing installations by connecting their systems to the internet and running the "runcpu --update" command. New users can purchase the benchmark on the SPEC website.

August 1, 2019: An update to the SPEC ACCEL® benchmark, version 1.3, is now available. This update includes minor bug fixes to the OpenMP and OpenCL suites. Licensees of previous versions of the benchmark can receive a complimentary upgrade to this version by contacting SPEC. As of October 9, 2019, all result submissions must be made using V1.3.

July 31, 2019: The SPEC/GWPG enewsletter, with the latest news and views on graphics and workstation performance evaluation, is live.

July 17, 2019: A call for contributions has been issued for the 11th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2020), April 20-24, 2020, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

June 26, 2019: Call-for-Nominations: SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2019. The award of $1000 is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2018 and September 2019. The submission deadline is September 30, 2019.

June 14, 2019: The llth annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) will be held April 20-24, 2020 in Edmonton, Canada.

May 29, 2019: The SPEC/GWPG enewsletter, with the latest news and views on graphics and workstation performance evaluation, is live.

May 24, 2019: Alex Shows, SPECwpc® chair, writes about measuring storage performance based on real-world applications in Storage Review.

May 22, 2019: The SPEC RG Cloud Working Group has published a free paper that outlines eight basic principles for better performance measurement of cloud environments.

May 21, 2019: Congrats to SPEC participants Jóakim von Kistowski, Johann Pais, Tobias Wahl, Klaus-Dieter Lange, Hansfried Block, John Beckett & Samuel Kounev for the award-winning ICPE2019 paper, "Measuring the Energy Efficiency of Transactional Loads on GPGPU".

May 17, 2019: One size rarely fits all in apparel or benchmarks. Read about the complexities of measuring GPU performance in Jon Peddie Research's GraphicSpeak newsletter.

April 16, 2019: More than 210 participants from industry and academia attended the 10th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2019) in Mumbai, India. Read more...

March 27, 2019: The SPEC/GWPG enewsletter, with the latest news and views on graphics and workstation performance evaluation, is live.

March 20, 2019: Congratulations to all the SPEC Award winners from around the globe. Read more about them here.

March 13, 2019: The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc) project group has released a Linux Edition of its SPECviewperf® 13 benchmark. The Linux Edition benchmark includes all the new features introduced in the Windows version last May.

February 26, 2019: The SERT® (Server Efficiency Rating Tool) suite debuted six years ago. It is now required by the EPA ENERGY STAR program and is evolving into an international standard for measuring server energy efficiency.

2018

October 31, 2018: The SPEC Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc®) project group has released the SPECworkstation® 3 benchmark, an all-new version of what was formerly known as the SPECwpc® benchmark. The benchmark includes new and updated workloads throughout the benchmark suite; it is free of charge to users except for sellers of computers and related products, who are required to buy a vendor license.

September 12, 2018: SPEC releases the SPECjEnterprise® 2018 Web Profile benchmark measuring full-system performance of Java EE 7 Web Profile application servers and their supporting infrastructure such as JVM, Database, CPU, disk and servers.

August 15, 2018: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization (SPECapc®) project group has updated its performance evaluation software for systems running Dassault Systemes' Solidworks CAD/CAM application. The new SPECapc® for Solidworks 2017 benchmark is designed to run on Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit platforms.

June 25, 2018: The 10th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2019) has issued a call for contributions and it will be held April 7-11, 2019 in Mumbai, India. ICPE brings together researchers and practitioners to report state-of-the-art and in-progress research on performance engineering of software and systems, including performance measurement, modeling, benchmark design, and run-time performance management.

This year's main theme is "performance engineering in the Artificial Intelligence era." The ICPE program committee is looking for contributions that use AI techniques to enhance the performance modeling, estimation, and optimization of complex systems. At the same time, contributions that analyze and improve AI systems are invited for submission.

May 30, 2018: SPEC's Research Group has issued a call for nominations for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award recognizing outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis. The award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2017 and September 2018.

May 23, 2018: The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc®) project group has released an all-new version of its SPECviewperf® benchmark. The SPECviewperf 13 benchmark features new volume visualization viewsets for energy and medical applications, a redesigned GUI, improved scoring and reporting methods, and updated viewsets to support more recent versions of the applications on which they are based.

March 1, 2018: As of March 1, 2018, SPEC offers the SPEC ACCEL®, SPEC MPI® 2007, and SPEC OMP® 2012 benchmarks free of charge to qualified non-profit organizations worldwide. Qualified organizations can request a license and software download.

January 7, 2018: SPEC relies on contributors outside of its membership to help develop far-reaching benchmark suites such as the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark. Here's the story of one of those contributors.

February 21, 2018: The Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award selection committee has chosen this year to select a winner and a runner up based on the high quality of both submissions. Aleksandar Milenkoski of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg as the winner of the 2017 SPEC Kaivalya Distinguished Dissertation Award and the committee decided to publicly recognize Benjamin Heintz, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. The awards will be presented at the ICPE 2018 conference in Berlin, Germany.

2017

December 20, 2017: The SPEC Storage committee has released an update to the SPEC SFS® 2014 SP2 benchmark. This update includes a new workload for the electronic design automation (EDA) market along with other enhancements to the benchmark suite.

December 20, 2017: SPEC's Solution File Server committee has changed their name to the Storage committee, chartered to create, distribute, and maintain a standardized benchmark for measuring the performance of storage solutions.

December 19, 2017: The SPEC Power committee has released an update to the SPEC SERT® suite to V2.0.1, which corrects an issue with the calculation of the final metric. A patch to update from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1 is available for existing licensees.

December 13, 2017: The SPECapc® project group released an updated version of the SPECapc® for Maya 2017 benchmark that improves the way multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is measured. Results from V1.0.6 of the benchmark are not comparable to those from previous versions. Free downloads of the benchmark are available to everyone but sellers of computers and related products.

October 17, 2017: The research and industrial/experience paper submission deadline for the ICPE 2018 conference to be held April 9-13, 2018 in Berlin, has been extended to October 25, 2017. Please see the important dates for abstract and paper submission and notification schedules.

October 12, 2017: The SPECjbb® 2015 benchmark has been updated to version 1.01. This update adds support for Java SE 9. Licensees of version 1.0 are entitled to a complimentary V1.01 upgrade. SPEC will be retiring V1.0 in January 2018, after which time all result submissions must be made with V1.01.

September 27, 2017: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization (SPECapc®) project group has released all-new performance evaluation software for systems running Autodesk Maya 2017 3D animation software. The SPECapc® for Maya 2017 benchmark includes nearly 80 individual tests that reflect the processes used to model, animate and render scenes within the application. The new benchmark was developed by SPECapc in cooperation with Autodesk, which supplied seven new graphics models and scenes.

August 14, 2017: With the release of the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark, SPEC will be retiring the SPEC CPU® 2006 suite in January 2018. Full details on the retirement schedule can be found here.

July 11, 2017: Michael Hines, a senior engineer at DigitalOcean, is not your typical user of a SPEC CPU® benchmark suite. He's not a high-end server user, a hardware system vendor, a researcher or an independent software vendor (ISV). Then why does he find the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark suite critically important to his work? Find out here.

June 27, 2017: SPEC's High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) has released a new version of its SPEC ACCEL® benchmark that adds a suite of OpenMP applications for measuring the performance of systems using hardware accelerator devices and supporting software. Other major updates in this version include the ability to add and change directives within the OpenMP and OpenACC suites to expose more parallelism for peak performance testing, and revised applications in the OpenACC suite to allow for successful GNU compiling.

June 20, 2017: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC CPU® 2017 benchmark, an all-new version of the benchmark suite for evaluating compute-intensive performance across a wide range of hardware systems. The suite contains 43 individual benchmarks organized into four suites. Among the new features are the option to use OpenMP for several of the SPECspeed® 2017 benchmarks and the ability to optionally measure and report power statistics. The suite is available now, with licensees of earlier versions of the CPU suites eligible for a discounted upgrade price.

June 20, 2017: Due to a known issue in Microsoft Windows Server 2016 memory management, the SERT® suite will not be supported on that operating system until a fix is made available. 

June 20, 2017: SPEC cannot provide support on the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark for test failures using Microsoft Windows Server 2016 due to an issue with large pages and memory management in the operating system.  Please contact Microsoft technical support for assistance.  Completed runs on Windows Server 2016 will be processed for review as usual.

June 8, 2017: The 9th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2018) has issued a call for contributions. Topics of interest include: performance modeling of software; performance and software development processes/paradigms; performance measurement, monitoring and analysis; benchmarking; run-time performance management; power and performance, energy efficiency; performance modeling and evaluation in different environments and application domains; and other topics related to performance of software and systems. ICPE2018 will take place April 9-13, 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

June 5, 2017: The SPECpower committee has released a new version of the PTDaemon® tool, the software that allows power measurement devices to be incorporated into performance evaluation software. Version 1.8.1 includes new support for Windows USBTMC using Keysight drivers and the Hioki PW3335 (single channel) power measurement device. Users of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark and the SERT® suite are encouraged to download and apply the update.

May 23, 2017: SPEC's Research Group has issued a call for nominations for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award recognizing outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis. The award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2016 and September 2017.

May 22, 2017: In an exclusive interview, Klaus-Dieter Lange, SPECpower chair, discusses the origin of SERT, the challenges of creating an international standard, the prospect of continued improvements in server efficiency, and his own personal growth in leading a diverse group of technologists.

May 22, 2017: SPEC's High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) is offering rewards of up to $5,000 and a free benchmark license for application code and datasets accepted under its new SPEC MPI Accelerator Benchmark Search Program. Applications that make it through the entire search program will be incorporated into a new benchmark currently called SPEC MPI ACCEL. The new benchmark will combine components of the current SPEC MPI® and SPEC ACCEL® benchmark suites.

April 18, 2017: Version 2.0 of the Chauffeur® Workload Development Kit (WDK) has been released. This major release is based on the SERT® 2.0 suite infrastructure and includes significant enhancements to the hardware detection, customization options of generating HTML reports, and developer documentation. It has now reduced memory requirements for the Director when signing results files and reduced the size of the result output for large systems or clusters. There is also an updated list of supported operating systems including Ubuntu (14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS) as well as current versions of Windows Server, RHEL, SLES, AIX, and Solaris.

April 4, 2017: A patch has been released for the SPEC VIRT_SC® 2013 V1.1 benchmark which addresses an issue encountered when running the webserver workload with TLS encryptions which would cause any result to be marked as invalid. Any result submissions using TLSv1, TLSv1.1, or TLSv1.2 encryptions for the webserver workload must use this patch.

April 4, 2017: Scott Beamer III from the University of California, Berkeley is the winner of the 2016 SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award with his dissertation on the characterization and treatment of fundamental performance bottlenecks in graph processing and the contribution of the Graph Algorithm Platform (GAP) benchmark suite.

March 28, 2017: SPEC announces the release of the Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT®) 2.0 suite, which adds a single-value metric, reduces runtime, improves automation and testing, and broadens device and platform support. Designed to be simple to configure and use via a comprehensive graphical user interface, the SERT® suite uses a set of synthetic worklets to test discrete system components such as processors, memory and storage, providing detailed power consumption data at different load levels.

March 22, 2017: Walter Bays steps down as SPEC president after presiding over 12 years of growth; he is succeeded by David Reiner, a SPEC 12-year veteran.

January 3, 2017: The SPEC Cloud® IaaS 2016 V1.1 benchmark is now available. This update includes bug fixes and usability improvements, libcloud support for easy adapter development, and OpenStack driver updates. Licensees of version 1.0 are entitled to a complimentary upgrade. Starting January 23, 2017, all result submissions must be made using version 1.1 and version 1.0 will be retired.

2016

September 21, 2016: The SPEC VIRT_SC® 2013 benchmark has been updated to version 1.1. This update includes added support for TLSv1, TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 with several new ciphers, an updated PTDaemon® tool version, and documentation updates.

August 24, 2016: The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc®) project group has released an updated version of its SPECviewperf® benchmark that features a new Autodesk 3ds Max viewset, Microsoft Windows 10 support, and GUI and reporting improvements. The benchmark runs under the 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 10. Results from V12.1 remain comparable to those from V12.0.1 and V12.0.2.

August 17, 2016: The SPEC JMS® 2007 benchmark will be retired on November 23, 2016. New result submissions will be accepted through November 9, 2016. After that time, no further submissions will be accepted and technical support will no longer be offered.

July 7, 2016: Call for nominations: SPEC's Research Group is soliciting nominations for the SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award. This award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. The award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 1, 2015 and September 30, 2016, and the nomination submission deadline is September 30, 2016.

July 6, 2016: The SPECapc® project group has released new performance evaluation software for systems running Siemens NX 9.0 and NX 10.0 CAD/CAM applications. The new benchmark can be run with Siemens NX 9.0 or NX 10.0, although results from the two different application versions are not comparable. Users need an NX 9.0 or NX 10.0 license that includes the NX Shape Studio or equivalent bundle for Advanced Studio rendering. The benchmark is designed to run on Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit platforms.

May 27, 2016: SPEC plans to bring a performance benchmarking symposium, a server efficiency symposium, and several of its technical meetings to Beijing, China, the week of October 24, 2016. This will be an opportunity to bring together computing researchers, policy makers, government agencies, industry practitioners and others interested in performance and energy-efficiency evaluation to learn about SPEC, share ideas, discuss challenges and present results. If you are interested in attending, please complete and submit this registration form.

May 3, 2016: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC Cloud® IaaS 2016 benchmark, that measures the performance of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud implementations. The benchmark measures scalability, elasticity and provisioning capabilities of IaaS cloud implementations, both public and private. Cloud providers, users of cloud services, and hardware, software and management platform vendors can use the benchmark to evaluate how different implementations affect cloud performance.

March 14, 2016: The SPEC Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc®) project group has added support for Windows 10 to the SPECwpc® V2.0 benchmark that measures all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications. The benchmark does not require the full application and associated licensing to be installed on the system under test, simplifying set-up, running and results reporting.

February 11, 2016: SPEC Symposium'16 - Energy Efficiency will be held on Friday, March 18th, in conjunction with ICPE 2016 at TU Delft, The Netherlands. First presented in the U.S. in January and scheduled to be delivered in Asia later this year, this will be the only opportunity to participate in this event in Europe. A broad range of contributors and presenters from industry and academia have worked diligently to create a detailed overview of the roadmap for energy efficiency as applied to servers. Limited seating is available. If you would like to attend, please register; there is no charge to attend the symposium.

January 27, 2016: Yufei Ren from Stony Brook University, New York is the winner of the 2015 SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award with his dissertation about scalable end-to-end data I/O over enterprise and datacenter networks. The award will be presented at the ICPE 2016 conference.

January 6, 2016: SPEC Symposium'16 - Energy Efficiency will be held on Monday, January 11th, in conjunction with SPEC's annual meeting at the Marriott Silicon Valley in Fremont, CA. There will be more than 10 presentations, including SPEC's Energy Metrics and The Future of Energy Efficiency of Servers. If you would like to attend, please register; there is no charge to attend the symposium.

2015

December 1, 2015: The deadline for the submission of workshop papers at the 7th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering has been extended. Please visit the ICPE Web site for more information on the workshops and the extended submission deadlines.

November 19, 2015: An update to the SPEC SFS® 2014 benchmark is now available. This update fixes a possible sensitivity to systems that have inline compression enabled and incorporates all errata fixes since the initial release. Going forward, all result submissions must be made using the SP1 version of the benchmark. Existing licensees of V1.0 are entitled to a free upgrade to SP1.

November 18, 2015: The SPEC Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc®) project group has released version 2.0 of the SPECwpc® benchmark, a major upgrade to its namesake benchmark that improves scalability measurement for workstations with large numbers of processing cores and fully integrates solid-state storage into performance testing.

September 30, 2015: SPEC HPG announces an update to the SPEC ACCEL® benchmark. The V1.1 update includes bug fixes, improved documentation and the PTDaemon® tool V1.7.1 and is available as of Sept. 30, 2015. Results from V1.0 will be accepted until the review cycle starting December 9, 2015. After that date, all submissions must be made using V1.1. Licensees of the SPEC ACCEL V1.0 benchmark should contact SPEC for upgrade information.

September 23, 2015: SPEC announces the release of the SPECjbb® 2015 benchmark, an enhanced Java server benchmark that now supports virtualized hosts, adds stricter performance validation, and specifies faster response times for a more accurate assessment of total capacity in a variety of real-world deployments.

September 23, 2015: The SPEC High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) has posted a YouTube video previewing a tutorial titled "Towards Comprehensive System Comparison". The session will be held at SC15 in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, November 15, 2015, 1:30 to 5 p.m. in Room 13AB. Through hands-on guidance and live demonstrations, SC15 attendees will discover how to use SPEC/HPG benchmarks for better analysis, evaluation and procurement of next-generation HPC systems.

August 27, 2015: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization (SPECapc®) project group has released new performance evaluation software for systems running Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 2015 CAD/CAM application. The benchmark consists of nine graphics and two CPU tests. It is designed to run on Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit platforms.

August 18, 2015: SPEC/GWPG previews upcoming benchmarking plans at SIGGRAPH. These include SPECviewperf® benchmark support for 4K-resolution content, upcoming workstation performance-measurement initiatives, and new application benchmarks.

August 18, 2015: Run rules change for the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark: The upper boundary of Calibration interval 0 has been increased to 105% due to issues with some multi-node configurations. Please check section 2.5.2 of the Run and Reporting Rules for details.

July 8, 2015: Call for contributions for ICPE 2016. The main theme for this year's conference is performance in the data center, in particular for hosting cloud applications and services. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished papers that are not being considered in another forum. See the conference website for submission guidelines and information.

June 25, 2015: Call for nominations: SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award 2015. The SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. The award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 1, 2014 and September 30, 2015, and the nomination submission deadline is September 30, 2015.

June 19, 2015: Klaus-Dieter Lange, SPEC board member and SPECpower chair, and Karl Huppler, a long-time supporting contributor to SPEC, are the authors of the recently released "Server Efficiency — Metrics for Computer Servers and Storage", the 12th book in the ASHRAE Datacom Series. Huppler calls the book "a valuable guide for choosing energy-efficiency measures for computer servers and associated storage." It can be purchased on the ASHRAE website.

June 11, 2015: LIMBO accepted as SPEC RG tool. LIMBO just became the newest member of the SPEC RG's repository of peer-reviewed tools for quantitative system evaluation and analysis. LIMBO is an Eclipse-based tool for handling, instantiating, and extracting load intensity models.

June 3, 2015: The SPEC Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc®) project group has released an updated benchmark that extends performance measurement from physical to virtualized workstation configurations. The new SPECwpc® V1.2 benchmark measures all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications. It supports various hypervisors for creating and running virtual machines, and includes GUI improvements.

May 26, 2015: The new Chauffeur® WDK V1.1.0 tool simplifies workload development for researchers analyzing system performance and power consumption. Targeting both industry and academia the WDK is based on the SERT® suite v1.1.0 infrastructure, providing run-time & platform configuration support to simplify worklet development. The WDK includes integration of the PTDaemon® tool for power analyzers and temperature sensors, along with data collection, validation and reporting.

March 10, 2015: The SERT® suite V1.1.0 is a significant update, adding support for e.g., Oracle Solaris 11 running on SPARC64 and SPARC T4 as well as Intel x86. The user interface has been enhanced to simplify multi-node test configuration, automated range setting support has been added, and it has been further tuned to deliver successful test passes with a wider range of server configurations. Current licensees will be entitled to a free upgrade post-release.

March 10, 2015: An updated release of the PTDaemon® tool, V1.7.1, is released with the SERT® suite V1.1.0. This release adds support for additional power analyzers, and enables DC power measurement with many of those analyzers.

February 25, 2015: A new version of the SPECviewperf® benchmark, version 12.0.2, has been released . This version adds support for virtualized workstation configurations. Results from version 12.0.2 are comparable to results from 12.0.1, but neither are comparable to previous versions of the benchmark.

February 17, 2015: With the release of the SPEC SFS® 2014 benchmark, SPEC has begun the process of retiring the SPEC SFS® 2008 benchmark. Results for the SPEC SFS 2008 benchmark will be accepted for review through April 27, 2015 for the review cycle beginning on April 28, 2015 and ending on May 12, 2015. After that time, no further results will be accepted for review or published on the SPEC website, and no further technical support for the benchmark will be provided.

January 7, 2015: SPEC announces the release of the SPECapc® for PTC Creo 3.0 benchmark. The benchmark provides eight workflows that exercise all aspects of system performance when running the popular product design application. A licensed copy of Creo 3.0 is required to run the benchmark software, which is available for download in both commercial and non-commercial versions.

2014

December 9, 2014: A defect has been identified in the SPECjbb® 2013 benchmark suite which impacts the comparability of results. Sales of the benchmark have been suspended and we are no longer accepting new submissions of results for publication on the SPEC website. The Java subcommittee is working to revise the benchmark to correct this defect, add additional validation safeguards, and release a new version as soon as possible. Current licensees will receive a free copy of the new version when it becomes available.

November 4, 2014: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC SFS^® 2014 benchmark, SPEC's updated benchmark suite to measure performance of a storage configuration as it interacts with four new application-based workloads.

October 1, 2014: The SPEC Research Group is happy to announce the launch of the DevOps Performance Working Group. The newly formed working group is concerned with combining application performance management (APM) and software performance engineering (SPE) activities for business-critical application systems.

August 14, 2014: SPEC's GWPG (Graphics and Workstation Performance Group) announced their benchmark roadmap for upcoming development, including a new strategy for the SPECviewperf® benchmark, upcoming workstation performance-measurement initiatives, and plans for updated application benchmarks.

August 13, 2014: The SPECapc® project group has released the SPECapc® for 3ds Max™ 2015 benchmark. It contains 48 tests for comprehensive measurement of modeling, interactive graphics, visual effects, CPU and GPU performance. It is currently available for download and purchase, and requires 64-bit Windows 7, 16GB of memory, and a working copy of 3ds Max 2015 with Service Pack 1 applied.

August 6, 2014: SPEC has released a new version of the PTDaemon® tool, v1.7.0. It is now available to all licensees of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark and the SERT® suite. This release adds the Yokogawa WT330 (single channel and 3-phase) as an accepted AC device. This release also adds support for DC power measurements for selected devices. Please note that no SPEC benchmarks/tools currently work with DC environments outside of the PTDaemon 1.7.0 tool itself. All SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark submissions on or after February 3rd, 2015 must be made with v1.7.0 (or higher) of the PTDaemon tool.

May 5, 2014: Call for Nominations: SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award 2014. SPEC's Distinguished Dissertation Award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. The award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 1, 2013, and September 30, 2014, and the nomination submission deadline is September 30, 2014.

April 16, 2014: Call for contributions to ICPE 2015: The 6th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2015) has issued a call for contributions on topics related to performance engineering of software and systems. ICPE 2015 will take place from January 31 to February 4, 2015 in Austin, Texas, USA.

March 27, 2014: SPEC has released a new version of the PTDaemon® tool, v1.6.3 which is now available to all licensees of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark and the SERT® suite. This release adds support for the Chroma 66203 and 66204. All SPECpower_ssj 2008 benchmark result submissions on or after November 25th, 2014 must be made with v1.6.3 (or higher) of the PTDaemon tool.

March 25, 2014: The Storage Performance Analyzer (SPA) framework just became the newest member of the SPEC RG's repository of peer-reviewed tools for quantitative system evaluation and analysis.

March 25, 2014: The third issue of the SPEC Research Group newsletter is now available. This regular publication provides information on the latest developments, news, and announcements relevant to the benchmarking and quantitative system evaluation communities.

March 18, 2014: SPEC/HPG announces the release of the SPEC ACCEL® V1.0 benchmark, which measures performance with computationally intensive parallel applications running under the OpenCL and OpenACC APIs. The suite exercises the performance of the accelerator, host CPU, memory transfer between host and accelerator, support libraries and drivers, and compilers.

March 18, 2014: SPEC announces the availability of the Chauffeur® Worklet Development Kit (WDK) tool, designed for use in creating new workloads for use in the Chauffeur framework. The WDK was designed to simplify the development of workloads for measuring both performance and energy efficiency.

March 10, 2014: Updates to the SPECviewperf® 12 (V12.0.1) benchmark and the SPECwpc® benchmark (V1.0.4) have been posted. These updates address a bug that affects performance in the energy-01 and medical-01 viewsets and correct a problem with reporting of screen resolution. Results are not comparable to earlier versions of the SPECviewperf 12 and SPECwpc benchmarks, and going forward all testing should be performed using these updated versions. If you have purchased a commercial license for the SPECviewperf or SPECwpc benchmark, please contact SPEC for information on obtaining the updates.

February 5, 2014: Registration is now open for ICPE 2014, the 5th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering. The conference takes place in Dublin, Ireland March 22-26. Discounted advance registration rates are available through February 21, 2014.

January 8, 2014: Anshul Gandhi (Carnegie Mellon University, now at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center) has been selected as the winner of the 2013 SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award for his work on "Dynamic Server Provisioning for Data Center Power Management". The prize will be awarded at the ICPE 2014 International Conference in Dublin, Ireland. The SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group.

2013

December 18, 2013: SPEC's Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc®) project group has released the SPECviewperf® 12 benchmark, an all-new version of the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance on systems running under the OpenGL and Direct X application programming interfaces.

December 16, 2013: An updated release of the PTDaemon® tool, v1.6.2 is now available to all licensees of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark and the SERT® suite. This release adds support for the Newtons4th PPA5x0. All SPEC benchmark and tool submissions that are made using the PTDaemon tool will require V1.6.2 from June 10th, 2014 onwards.

November 14, 2013: SPEC's Workstation Performance Characterization project group has released the SPECwpc® V1.0 benchmark, designed to measure all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications. A first set of results is available, and the benchmark is available for download in versions for both commercial and non-commercial use.

September 19, 2013: The SERT® suite V1.0.2 is now available. This is a point release which includes several enhancements, including support for 32-bit ARM processors, updated documentation and general bugfixes. Current licensees are entitled to a free update.

August 8, 2013: The SPEC VIRT_SC® 2010 benchmark will be retired on February 26, 2014 in favor of its successor, the SPEC VIRT_SC® 2013 benchmark. New result submissions will be accepted through February 26, 2014. After that time, no further submissions will be accepted and support will be terminated. As SPEC VIRT_SC 2010 benchmark results must be reviewed by SPEC before publication, independent publication of results post-benchmark retirement is not allowed.

July 24, 2013: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization project group has released an updated SPECapc® benchmark for Siemens NX 8.5. New features in the benchmark include quality control improvements, faster runtimes and automatic collection of system information for result submissions for publication on the SPEC website.

July 24, 2013: An updated release of the PTDaemon® tool, V1.6.1, is now available. This release includes support for the Newtons4th PPA5530 power analyzer, together with some optimizations in support of the SERT® suite V1.0.1 release, All SPEC benchmark and tool submissions that are made while using the PTDaemon tool will require V1.6.1 from January 14th , 2014 onwards.

July 24, 2013: An update to the SERT® suite, V1.0.1 is now available. This release includes significant enhancements to simplify selecting appropriate JVM options and counts as part of suiteconfiguration. The GUI has been significantly updated to support this new feature, together with other usability enhancements suggested by early adopters. Support for PowerLinux has been added, and significant documentation updates are also included. Existing users of the SERT suite V1.0.0 are strongly encouraged to download this update and begin testing with it.

July 8, 2013: The second issue of the SPEC Research Group newsletter is now available. This regular publication provides information on the latest developments, news, and announcements relevant to the benchmarking and quantitative system evaluation communities.

July 1, 2013: The SPECjbb® 2005 benchmark will be retired on October 1, 2013 in favor of its successor, the SPECjbb® 2013 benchmark. New result submissions will be accepted through October 1, 2013. After that time, no further submissions will be accepted and support will be terminated. Please see the benchmark information page for further information regarding independent publication of results post-benchmark retirement.

June 20, 2013: The 5th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2014) has issued a call for papers on topics related to performance engineering of software and systems.

June 6, 2013: Call for Nominations: SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award 2013. SPEC's Distinguished Dissertation Award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. The award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 1, 2012, and September 30, 2013, and the nomination submission deadline is September 30, 2013.

May 22, 2013: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC VIRT_SC® 2013 benchmark, the latest suite for performance evaluation of datacenter servers used in virtualized server consolidation. While sharing the general architecture of the SPEC VIRT_SC® 2010 benchmark, the new suite utilizes heavier and more bursty workloads that require virtual machines with more memory and vCPUs and further stress the system's ability to meet the benchmark's quality of service requirements. Changes include modified workloads and the replacement of the Idle Server with the Batch Server.

March 22, 2013: An updated PTDaemon® tool, V1.6.0 is now available. This release adds support for the Yokogawa WT310, two iButtonLink temperature sensors, and 3-phase power measurement support. Additional stability enhancements and support for non-standard baud rates have also been added, among other changes. Users of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark and the SERT® suite are encouraged to download and apply the update. All SPECpower_ssj 2008 benchmark submissions on or after September 18th, 2013 must be made with v1.6.0 of the PTDaemon tool.

March 13, 2013: SPEC announces the release of the SPECapc® for SolidWorks 2013™ benchmark. The benchmark includes 10 new models, each of which is exercised with 12 tests. Models were selected from the SolidWorks user community, with an emphasis on real-world datasets that can be distributed in the public domain. It is available in versions for both commercial and personal use.

February 26, 2013: SPEC announces the release of the Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT®) suite. It is intended to measure server energy efficiency, initially as part of the second generation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR for Computer Servers program. Designed to be simple to configure and use via a comprehensive graphical user interface, the SERT® suite uses a set of synthetic worklets to test discrete system components such as processors, memory and storage, providing detailed power consumption data at different load levels.

January 25, 2013: SPEC's Research Group has selected Shicong Meng from the Georgia Institute of Technology as the winner of the 2012 SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award, which will be awarded at the ICPE 2013 International Conference. The Distinguished Dissertation Award is given to a Ph.D. student whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution in the scope of the SPEC Research Group.

January 23, 2013: SPEC announces the release of the SPECjbb® 2013 benchmark, developed from the ground up to measure performance based on the latest Java application features. It is expected to be used widely by all those interested in Java server performance, including JVM vendors, hardware developers, Java application developers, researchers and members of the academic community. New features include support for multiple run configurations, exercise of new Java 7 features, and support for virtualization and cloud environments.

January 23, 2013: The SERT® suite Demo session is currently in progress (1:30 PM - 4:00 PM Central time). If you would like to attend the demo, please register and the WebEx login information will be sent to you.

2012

December 13, 2012: An updated PTDaemon® tool, V1.5.0 is now available. This release adds support for multichannel and multiphase measurements on suitably configured power analyzers, together with a comprehensive set of fixes and enhancements across the accepted set of power analyzers. Users of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark are encouraged to download and apply the update. All benchmark result submissions on or after June 12th, 2013 must be made with v1.5.0 of the PTDaemon tool.

December 11, 2012: A SERT® suite Training/Demo session will be run in conjunction with the SPEC Annual and Joint Meeting in Austin, TX. This session will take place on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 from 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM CST at the Austin Convention Center. You must register in order to attend the demo. Upon completion of the session, attendees will receive a Certificate of Participation.

November 14, 2012: A new Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc®) project group has become part of SPEC's Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG). SPECwpc joins GWPG's SPECapc® and SPECgpc® project groups operating under the SPEC/GWPG umbrella. The newest SPEC/GWPG project group is creating a benchmark that measures the performance of workstations running algorithms used in popular applications, but without requiring the full application and associated licensing to be installed on the system under test. Visit the SPECwpc overview page for more information.

November 13, 2012: Alan Adamson, member of the SPEC Board of Directors, passed away on October 31, 2012. In addition to his role as a board member, Alan had served as chair of the Java subcommittee and the OSG Steering Committee. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the SPEC Research Group and the ICPE series of joint conferences with ACM.

October 26, 2012: SPEC's Research Group has formed a new working group called "Benchmarking Architectures for Intrusion Detection in Virtualized Environments" whose mission is to foster and to facilitate innovative research in computer system and network intrusion detection, with special attention given to benchmarking intrusion detection systems in virtualized cloud environments. Visit the official website of the group for further information.

October 17, 2012: SPEC's High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) has released an updated benchmark for measuring performance using applications based on the OpenMP 3.1 standard for shared-memory parallel processing. The SPEC OMP® 2012 benchmark includes an optional metric for measuring energy consumption. Existing licensees of the SPEC OMP® 2001 benchmark qualify for discounted upgrade pricing to the new version.

September 11, 2012: SPEC's Research Group, as part of their mission to foster the exchange of knowledge and experiences between industry and academia in the field of quantitative system evaluation and analysis, has published the first issue of the Research Group Newsletter. This regular publication will provide you with information on latest developments, news and announcements relevant to the benchmarking and quantitative system evaluation communities.

August 8, 2012: SPECapc announces the release of the SPECapc® for Autodesk Maya 2012 benchmark. The benchmark software is available as a free download for Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit platforms.

July 26, 2012: The SPECpower_ssj® 2008 V1.12 benchmark is now available. This is a point release which includes updates to the reporter, the PTDaemon® tool, and support for a new analyzer. For a list of the latest changes, see the release notes. Starting December 11, 2012, all results must be published using V1.12. Current licensees of previous versions of the software are eligible to receive a free upgrade to V1.12 by contacting SPEC.

July 18, 2012: Call for Papers, ICPE 2013: SPEC announces a call for papers for the 4th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, to be held in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 21-24, 2013. Submissions are invited in any of five tracks: Research; Industrial Applications and Experience; Posters and Demos; Tutorials; and Work-in-Progress and Vision Papers. Paper submission dates vary by track; please see the ICPE website for further details.

June 13, 2012: SPEC's Open Systems Group (OSG) has formed a new Cloud group to work in cooperation with other SPEC committees and subcommittees to define cloud benchmark methodologies, determine and recommend application workloads, identify cloud metrics for existing SPEC benchmarks, and develop new cloud benchmarks. Participation from cloud providers and users is welcomed.

June 12, 2012: SPEC is seeking beta testers for the Server Efficiency Rating Tool. Measurement and reporting via the SERT® suite will be required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR for Servers v2.0 specification. SERT suite Beta-2 testing is open to anyone who has a SPEC-accepted power analyzer and temperature sensor, signs a beta license, and commits to providing feedback.

June 4, 2012: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization project group announces the release of the SPECapc® for PTC Creo® 2.0 benchmark. The benchmark provides eight workflows that exercise all aspects of system performance when running the popular application. Composite scores are generated for graphics, shaded graphics, wireframe graphics, CPU and I/O performance.

May 23, 2012: An updated PTDaemon® tool, V1.4.2, for the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark has been released. Benchmark users are encouraged to download and apply the update. All SPECpower_ssj 2008 benchmark submissions on or after November 14th, 2012 must be made with v1.4.2 of the PTDaemon tool. No further submissions with Solaris running on either an x86 or SPARC-based Controller will be accepted after August 8th, 2012.

April 11, 2012: SPEC's Application Performance Characterization (SPECapc®) project group has released the SPECapc® for Siemens NX 6 benchmark. The benchmark is freely available for download.

April 5, 2012: The SPECjEnterprise® 2010 v1.03 benchmark is now available. This update includes performance-neutral changes to address known issues. Beginning May 1, 2012, all result submissions must be made using version 1.03. Licensees of earlier versions of the benchmark may request a free update to 1.03 by contacting SPEC.

March 26, 2012: ICPE 2012, the Third ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, will be held April 22-25 in Boston, MA. Advance registration for the technical program and tutorials ends on April 15.

February 7, 2012: SPEC's Research Group (SPEC RG) opens a repository of peer-reviewed tools for quantitative system evaluation and analysis. As a contribution to the community, SPEC RG addresses the need for a collection of tools that have undergone a thorough review process by multiple independent experts to ensure high quality, maturity and relevance.

January 18, 2012: SPEC is beginning investigation of a proposed new benchmark that would measure compute-intensive performance of handheld devices such as tablets and smart phones. The first face-to-face meeting in the exploratory process will be held Monday morning, January 30, in San Jose, California. Anyone interested in attending this meeting or participating in the handheld working group should contact SPEC at corporate@spec.org for more information and registration.

January 4, 2012: SPEC's Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) is seeking applications, algorithms and workloads for a proposed workstation performance benchmark.

January 3, 2012: Reminder: The SPECweb® 2005 and SPECweb® 2009 benchmarks will be retired on January 12. After that date, no further result submissions for publication will be accepted and technical support for the software will end. Please see the retirement notice for information regarding post-retirement publication of results independently of SPEC.

2011

December 22, 2011: Luk Van Ertvelde of Ghent University and Kai Sachs of TU Darmstadt first to win new SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award.

December 15, 2011: REMINDER: Starting at 3AM Eastern US Time on December 20, 2011, SPEC will stop accepting SPEC CPU® 2006 V1.1 benchmark results for publication on the SPEC website; at that point SPEC will only accept SPEC CPU 2006 V1.2 benchmark results. For more information about V1.2, please see http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/press/v1.2release.html.

November 14, 2011: SPEC/HPG developing new benchmark to evaluate systems with floating-point accelerator

September 28, 2011: SPEC releases first beta of Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT®)

September 13, 2011: The SPECpower_ssj® 2008 V1.11 benchmark has been released. This update includes several enhancements and code changes to all benchmark components, documentation updates, and run and reporting rules enhancements. All results published after December 13, 2011 must use version 1.11. All existing licensees will receive a notice on how to get a free update.

September 7, 2011: The SPEC CPU® 2006 V1.2 benchmark has been released. Changes in this version address additional tools and features to improve results checking/automation, updated tools sets for recent operating changes, porting changes for new environments and updates to address bugs and errata. These changes are performance neutral and v1.2 results are comparable to previous versions of the benchmark. Contact the SPEC office with any questions.

September 6, 2011: SPEC announces the release of the SPECsip_Infrastructure® 2011 benchmark, designed to evaluate a system's ability to act as a SIP server supporting a particular SIP application. The application modeled is a VoIP deployment for an enterprise, telco, or service provider, where the SIP server performs proxying and registration.

August 9, 2011: The SPECmail® 2001 and SPECmail® 2009 benchmarks will be retired on 31 October 2011. The SPECweb® 2005 and SPECweb® 2009 benchmarks will be retired on 12 January 2012. Benchmark sales, support, and result publication will be affected.

August 9, 2011: The Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) announces a new application-level benchmark for Autodesk Maya 2012 and outlines a new vision for its SPECviewperf performance evaluation software. For details, please see the press release.

July 29, 2011: SPEC's privacy policy has been updated.

July 22, 2011: Call for Papers, ICPE 2012; SPEC announces a call for papers for the 3rd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, to be held in Boston, April 22-25, 2012. Submissions are invited in any of five tracks: Research; Industrial Applications and Experience; Posters and Demos; Tutorials; and Work-in-Progress and Vision Papers. Paper submission dates vary by track; please see the ICPE website for further details.

July 20, 2011: Call-for-Nominations: SPEC Benchmarking Research PhD Award 2011; an exceptional, innovative contribution in the scope of SPEC's Research Group.

July 6, 2011: SPEC announces the release of the SPECapc® for 3ds Max 2011 benchmark. The software is available in two versions: the Professional version which is required for any organization submitting results for publication on the SPEC web site or distributed to the public, and the Personal version, which provides a subset of the professional tests for personal use only. Both versions are now available for purchase and download.

May 23, 2011: The SPEC VIRT_SC® 2010 v1.01 benchmark has been released. Changes in this version consist of minor bug fixes, improvements and clarifications in documentation and run and reporting rules. Changes are performance neutral and v1.01 results are comparable to v1.0 results. Starting August 10, 2011, all result submissions must use v1.01. Existing licensees may request a free v1.01 CD by sending email to info@spec.org.

March 15, 2011: SPEC's Research Group has been formed to develop standard scenarios and workloads for emerging technologies and applications. It is designed to encourage exchange among representatives from industry, academia and research institutes. For further information, see http://research.spec.org/.

February 8, 2011: SPEC mourns the loss of Larry Gray, longtime SPEC treasurer and technical contributor, who passed away on January 30, 2011.

2010

December 9, 2010: The SPECweb® 2009 v1.20 benchmark is now available. This update includes performance neutral updates and bug fixes. Licensees of earlier versions of the benchmark may request a free update to 1.20 by contacting SPEC.

December 9, 2010: The SPECjEnterprise® 2010 v1.02 benchmark is now available. This update includes performance-neutral workload changes to address known issues. Licensees of earlier versions of the software may request a free update to 1.02 by contacting SPEC.

November 23, 2010: The SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark is being retired in favor of its successor, the SPECjEnterprise® 2010 benchmark. New result submissions will be accepted through November 30, 2010. After that time, no further submissions will be accepted and the benchmark will be retired.

September 22, 2010: The program for the October 8, 2010 International SPEC Benchmark Workshop 2010 in Paderborn, Germany is available and registration is now open. Registration is free and includes all beverages and a lunch, but advance registration is requested.

July 14, 2010: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC VIRT_SC® 2010 benchmark, SPEC's first benchmark addressing performance evaluation of datacenter servers used in virtualized server consolidation. It measures the end-to-end performance of all system components including the hardware, virtualization platform, and the virtualized guest operating system and application software.

July 13, 2010: SPEC announces a call for papers for the 2011 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE). Please see the call for papers for deadlines for the various submission tracks and tutorial proposals.

June 23, 2010: SPECgpc announces the release of the SPECviewperf® 11 benchmark, now available for download or on DVD.

June 21, 2010: The submission deadline for papers for the October 2010 Benchmark Workshop has been extended from June 14 to June 28.

May 17, 2010: SPEC announces the release of the SPECmail® 2009 v1.01 benchmark. This update addresses an existing issue with international date formats and more robust IMAP4 server interactions. Current benchmark licensees may request a free upgrade by contacting SPEC.

March 1, 2010: A new version, 1.3.10, of the PTDaemon® tool is now available. Please see the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 benchmark's Accepted Measurement Devices page for updated power analyzer support and instructions for updating your tool's binary to the latest version.

February 2, 2010: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC MPI® 2007 v2.0 benchmark, which adds the MPIL2007 suite to allow testing up to 2048 ranks. For further information on new and updated features, please see the list of changes in v2.0.

January 14, 2010: SPEC announces the release of the SPECweb® 2005 v1.30 benchmark. This update adds support for ASPX scripts to the existing JSP and PHP support. Current benchmark licensees may request a free upgrade.

2009

December 9, 2009: Registration is still open for the first joint WOSP/SIPEW International Conference on Performance Engineering, being held in cooperation with ACM SIGSOFT and ACM SIGMETRICS, from January 28-30, 2010. See http://www.wosp-sipew.org/ for further information.

December 3, 2009: SPEC announces the release of the SPECjEnterprise® 2010 benchmark. This benchmark measures full-system performance for Java Enterprise Edition 5 or later application servers, databases and supporting infrastructure and expands the scope of the SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark.

October 22, 2009: SPEC has released a new version of the SPECweb® 2009 benchmark. The updated version 1.10 includes new ASPX scripts in addition to the previously included PHP and JSP based scripts. Results from using each of these types of scripts will have different metric names and will be tabulated separately.

September 9, 2009: SPEC has formed a new working group to develop standard methods of measuring performance for typical middleware, database and hardware deployments of applications based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

September 4, 2009: The SPECpower committee declares its intent to design, develop and deliver a next generation tool set that will measure and evaluate the performance and power of computer servers over a wider spectrum of functionality. The tool set will have the potential to be adopted by the EPA for use in the US EPA Server Energy Star program and to form a solid basis for the next generation SPECpower benchmark.

July 8, 2009: SPEC/GWPG announces the release of the SPECapc® for Maya 2009 benchmark, available now for download.

July 6, 2009: The submission deadline for papers and tutorial proposals for the First Joint WOSP/SIPEW International Conference on Performance Engineering has been extended to July 21. See http://www.wosp-sipew.org/ for further information.

June 29, 2009: The SPEC CPU® Benchmark Search program is currently accepting submissions of applications that could be used in the next SPEC CPU suite; submissions that are accepted by SPEC and are included in the next suite earn their submitters $5000 and a license for the new suite (when released).

June 5, 2009: SPEC announces the release of the SPECweb® 2009 web server performance benchmark suite. New with the SPECweb 2009 benchmark is a power workload, with measurements based on the SPECpower methodology, and a performance/power metric.

May 6, 2009: Announcing the First Joint WOSP/SIPEW International Conference on Performance Engineering, in cooperation with ACM SIGSOFT and ACM SIGMETRICS, to be held January 28-30, 2010. The deadline for submission of papers and tutorial proposals is July 7, 2009. For more information, please see http://www.wosp-sipew.org/.

April 17, 2009: SPEC's privacy policy has been updated. A list of recent changes, effective as of April 17, 2009, can be found in the policy statement.

April 15, 2009: SPEC announces blade server support with the release of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 1.10 benchmark. This release adds several new capabilities including support for measuring multi-node (blade) servers, further automation of power measurement, support for multiple power analyzers, and a visual activity monitor which provides real-time graphic display of data collected while running the benchmark. This update will be provided on CD at no charge to existing licensees of the software.

April 6, 2009: SPEC announces the release of the SPECapc® for Lightwave 3D v9.6 benchmark. The benchmark is available now as a free download for Microsoft Windows XP and Vista 32- and 64-bit platforms.

March 10, 2009: SPEC announces the release of the SPECmail® 2009 benchmark, a new version of the enterprise mail server benchmark featuring a new workload, support for SSL/TLS encryption, and improved interoperability across different platforms. An initial set of results is available.

2008

December 30, 2008: The application deadline for student grants for attending the 2009 SPEC Benchmark Workshop has been extended from December 29, 2008 to January 9, 2009.

December 16, 2008: The program for the 2009 SPEC Benchmark Workshop is now available. There is no registration fee to attend, but advance registration is required.

November 11, 2008: SPEC CPU® Benchmark Search program: SPEC is looking for applications that could be used in the next SPEC CPU suite; submissions that are accepted by SPEC and are included in the next suite earn their submitters $5000 and a license for the new suite (when released).

October 6, 2008: The deadline for paper submissions for the SPEC Benchmark Workshop 2009 to be held in Austin, Texas in January 2009 has been extended. The initial paper or extended abstract submission deadline is now October 15.

October 6, 2008: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC MPI® 2007 V1.1 benchmark. This release adds updates to benchmarks in order to improve portability and code correctness; improvements to report readability; clarifications and additions to the run and reporting rules; improvements to the documentation, including of the monitor hooks; and easier investigation of alternate sources or workloads. Results from V1.0 are comparable to those from V1.1. Beginning January 1, 2009 all benchmark submissions will require the use of version 1.1.

August 26, 2008: The submission dates for papers or extended abstracts for the SPEC Benchmark Workshop 2009 have been updated. The submission deadline is now October 3, 2008.

August 26, 2008: Result submissions for the SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark using V1.0.1 will be accepted until September 2. After that date, all submissions must be made using V1.1.

August 19, 2008: SPEC announces the release of the SPECmail® 2008 benchmark, designed to measure performance of enterprise mail servers compliant with SMTP and IMAP4 protocols. An initial set of results is available.

August 13, 2008: SPEC/GWPG announced a range of upcoming benchmarks at SIGGRAPH 2008. The new offerings will include a power-performance benchmark for workstations, a new version of SPECviewperf, and new and updated application benchmarks.

July 24, 2008: SPEC announces the release of the SPECpower_ssj® 2008 V1.01 benchmark. This release adds usability upgrades as well as updates to the Run and Reporting Rules, the Design documentation and SPEC's Power and Performance Methodology. Results from V1.00 are comparable to those from V1.01. Beginning September 10, 2008 all benchmark result submissions will require the use of version 1.01.

June 3, 2008: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC CPU® 2006 V1.1 benchmark, adding usability and portability upgrades. Results from V1.1 are comparable to those from V1.0 and V1.0.1.

May 21, 2008: The SPECgpc® project group releases the SPECviewperf® 10 for Linux/Unix benchmark, available now for download.

May 20, 2008: The SPECweb committee has begun work on a new benchmark to measure power consumption for web servers.

May 7, 2008: SPEC announces the release of the SPECjvm® 2008 benchmark, a benchmark suite for measuring the performance of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE), containing several real life applications and benchmarks focusing on core java functionality. SPECjvm2008 is available as a free download.

March 19, 2008: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC SFS® 2008 benchmark, designed to evaluate the speed and request-handling capabilities of file servers utilizing the NFSv3 and CIFS protocols. An initial set of benchmark results is available.

March 18, 2008: SPEC/GWPG has begun development of an industry-standard benchmark measuring power consumption in relation to performance for professional workstations.

2007

November 27, 2007: The deadline for submission of papers or extended abstracts for the 2008 Benchmark Workshop has been extended to Friday, December 7.

October 25, 2007: SPEC announces the release of the new SPECjms® 2007 benchmark, designed to measure performance of enterprise messaging servers based on JMS (Java Message Service).

September 28, 2007: SPEC issues a call for papers for the 2008 Benchmark Workshop to be held January 27, 2008 in Millbrae, CA. The submission deadline for papers or extended abstracts is November 26, 2007.

September 12, 2007: SPEC's Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) releases an updated SPECapc® for UGS NX 4 benchmark.

September 10, 2007: SPEC's Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) invites parties interested in open source, freely-available graphics benchmarks for OpenGL ES to participate in a teleconference on Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 1:00 PM EDT.

September 6, 2007: SPEC's Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) is looking for organizations interested in developing standardized, open-source graphics benchmarks for OpenGL ES.

August 7, 2007: SPEC's graphics performance group, formerly known as GPC, expands its scope; under the new charter, the renamed Graphics & Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) can investigate standardized benchmarking projects in areas such as OpenGL ES, rendering, digital video and photography, power consumption, and a full range of workstation applications.

July 18, 2007: SPECapc announces the release of the SPECapc® for 3ds Max 9 benchmark, now available for download.

July 17, 2007: SPEC announces the release of the SPEC MPI® 2007 benchmark, designed to measure the performance of parallel computing systems and clusters running Message-Passing Interface (MPI) applications. Review the press release, or browse the first set of published results.

June 12, 2007: Program details and a schedule for the SPEC Benchmarking Joint US/Europe Colloquium, to be held June 22 at the Technical University of Dresden, are available.

May 30, 2007: The SPECopc® project group announces the release of the SPECViewperf® 10. Review the first set of published results or download the software.

May 9, 2007: The SPECapc® project group releases the SPECapc® for SolidWorks 2007 benchmark. Read the press release or download the benchmark.

April 6, 2007: The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH) has published a series of 11 articles analyzing SPEC CPU® 2006. The articles are in the March 2007 issue of the newsletter Computer Architecture News, and are also available here.

March 27, 2007: SPEC has formed a new subcommittee to develop standard methods of comparing performance for servers using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). A first version of the benchmark is being defined based on a SIP proxy server modeling an enterprise VoIP deployment.

March 5, 2007: The SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark has been retired in favor of the SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark. The software is still available for purchase, but technical support is no longer being offered and no further result submissions will be accepted for publication on this site; the final sets of SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark results will be published in late March.

February 28, 2007: SPEC's APC project group releases the SPECapc® for Solid Edge V19 benchmark. A benchmark overview and the first set of published results are now available.

February 20, 2007: The SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark has been updated to version 1.08, with the addition of a new workload for use in research and development environments. The original workload remains unchanged, and V1.08 results are comparable to results from previous versions of the benchmark. Comparisons of the research workload with the SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark results are not permitted.

February 20, 2007: SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark result submissions will be accepted through 9:30 AM Eastern time on February 24. After that time, no further submissions will be accepted and the suite will be retired. All SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark results submitted must have a corresponding SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark result.

February 5, 2007: SPEC will hold a free one-day benchmarking workshop on June 22, 2007 at the Technical University of Dresden. Paper submissions will be accepted until May 1, 2007.

February 5, 2007: The SPEChpc™ 2002 benchmark is being retired. The last set of result submissions will be accepted for the review cycle beginning on June 20, 2007.

February 2, 2007: The papers and slides from the January 2007 Benchmark Workshop in Austin, TX are now available for download.

January 3, 2007: Registration for the 2007 Benchmark Workshop is now open. Hotel information and the workshop schedule are also available.

2006

November 17, 2006: The deadline for submissions for the 2007 Benchmark Workshop has been extended to November 28, 2006.

October 13, 2006: SPEC has issued a call for papers for the 2007 Benchmark Workshop, to be held January 21, 2007 in Austin, TX.

September 26, 2006: The SPECopc® project group has posted an update to the SPECviewperf® 9 benchmark. Version 9.0.3 corrects a script error in the Linux/Unix version of the benchmark and is available for download as a full package or as an update patch for the Linux/Unix version.

August 24, 2006: The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark has arrived! SPEC is proud to announce the release of its next-generation benchmark for CPU-intensive performance. Read the press release and background information, and see the first set of results.

August 9, 2006: Updates to two suites are available: the SPECjbb® 2005 benchmark version 1.07 and the SPEC OMP® 2001 V3.1c benchmark.

August 3, 2006: The SPECopc® project group previews the SPECviewperf® 10 benchmark at SIGGRAPH.

August 2, 2006: The SPECapc® project group releases the SPECapc® for 3ds Max 8 benchmark. Read more about the benchmark, or view the first set of published results.

July 10, 2006: The SPECweb® 2005 V1.10 benchmark is now available. This point release adds the ability to use multiple BeSim servers, display statistics on the prime client, and includes several documentation updates. Further information, including the last scheduled submission dates for results using V1.02 and copies of the updated V1.10 documentation, can be found at the benchmark information pages. Current benchmark licensees will receive an update CD.

June 19, 2006: Licensees of the SPEC CPU® 2000 V1.3 benchmark should download an updated copy of the benchmark's run and reporting rules. This version replaces the document shipped with the CD.

May 25, 2006: Copies of the papers and slides presented at the 2006 SPEC Benchmark Workshop are now available for download.

May 17, 2006: SPEC releases the SPECviewperf® 9 benchmark. The first set of published results is also available.

May 15, 2006: SPEC announces the formation of the Power-Performance committee to develop standard methods and metrics for comparing energy use of server-class computers.

April 20, 2006: HPG releases an update of the SPEC OMP® 2001 benchmark to V3.1. Please see the changes in V3.1 document for the updates from V3.0 and SPEC OMP 2001 for information on upgrades and result submission deadlines.

April 14, 2006: The OSG benchmark results search engine has been updated to allow searching on cores, chips, or cores per chip as individual numeric fields.

March 15, 2006: The SPECapc® project group has published a paper on performance differences between 32- and 64-bit versions of Pro/ENGINEER.

March 1, 2006: The SPECapc® project group project group project group releases new benchmark for systems running UGS NX 3™ digital product development software. Find out more about the benchmark or view the first set of published results.

February 28, 2006: The SPECapc and SPECopc® project groups are seeking ISVs, software user groups, publication editors and testing lab directors to help develop and maintain standardized benchmarks based on graphics-intensive applications. The benefits to your organization can be numerous. See the announcement for further information.

February 15, 2006: The SPECapc® project group releases a new benchmark for systems running Pro/ENGINEER^TM Wildfire 2.0.

2005

December 27, 2005: The schedule, hotel, and registration information for the 2006 SPEC Benchmark Workshop (January 23, 2006 in Austin, TX) is now available.

December 12, 2005: Beginning January 1, 2006, all SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark results must be submitted using version 1.3. Submissions for the SPECjbb® 2000 benchmark will be accepted through January 4, 2006; after that date, only submissions from the SPECjbb® 2005 benchmark will be accepted.

November 30, 2005: The deadline for submissions for the SPEC Benchmark Workshop 2006 has been extended to December 9, 2005.

November 7, 2005: The SPEC Benchmark Workshop 2006 will take place January 23, 2006 in conjunction with the SPEC annual meeting. The deadline for paper submissions (extended extracts or full papers) is November 25, 2005; see the announcement for details.

November 1, 2005: A maintenance release of the SPECweb® 2005 benchmark, V1.02, is now shipping. For information on the changes, see the V1.02 README.

November 1, 2005: The SPEC CPU® 2000 V1.3 benchmark is now shipping. The latest version of the suite provides additional platform support and improves portability; for details on the changes, please see Changes in V1.3.

September 6, 2005: SPEC has identified a code defect in the JSP implementation for the Banking workload in the SPECweb® 2005 benchmark; for details please see the full notice. SPEC is superceding the v1.00 release with the SPECweb® 2005 benchmark v1.01. Current licensees of v1.00 should contact the SPEC office to obtain an update to 1.01.

September 6, 2005: SPEC's High Performance Group (HPG) is seeking Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications for a new computer benchmarking suite scheduled for release in 2006.

September 2, 2005: The Web subcommittee is currently accepting new candidates for dynamic implementations for the SPECweb® 2005 for possible inclusion in an upcoming release of the benchmark suite.

August 31, 2005: Submissions for the SPECweb® 99 and SPECweb® 99_SSL benchmarks will be accepted until Sept. 27, 2005. After that date, only SPECweb® 2005 benchmark submissions will be accepted.

August 31, 2005: Submissions for the SPECjbb® 2000 benchmark will be accepted through Jan. 4, 2006. After that date, only SPECjbb® 2005 benchmark submissions will be accepted.

August 31, 2005: The submission deadline for results from the SPEChpc™ 2002 and SPEC OMP® 2001 benchmarks has changed; please see the submission calendar for the due dates.

August 17, 2005: SPEC releases the SPECapc® for Maya 6.5 benchmark. The benchmark is now available for download and the first set of published results has been posted.

August 3, 2005: SPEC's GPC group presents demonstrations of the upcoming SPECviewperf® 9 and SPECapc® for Maya 6.5 benchmarks and announces plans for additional CAD releases.

June 22, 2005: The first set of results for the SPECjbb® 2005 benchmark have been posted.

June 22, 2005: SPEC releases the SPECweb® 2005 benchmark, the next-generation benchmark for measuring the performance of web servers. The benchmark contains multiple, standardized workloads utilizing both HTTP and HTTPS, dynamic content implemented in PHP and JSP, and other enhancements. See the FAQ and the press release for additional information. You can also view the first set of submitted results.

June 16, 2005: SPEC releases the SPECjbb® 2005 benchmark for evaluating the performance of server side Java. The new benchmark is a major update to the SPECjbb® 2000 benchmark; see the press release and the FAQ for information regarding some of the changes.

May 25, 2005: The SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark has been updated to version 1.05. The updates include small performance-neutral convenience features and documentation clarifications, the benchmark workload has not changed. For more information see the release notes.

May 11, 2005: GPC releases the SPECviewperf® 8.1 benchmark. Read the press release, view the first set of submitted results, or download the benchmark.

April 27, 2005: GPC releases the SPECapc® for 3ds max 7 benchmark. Read the press release, view the first set of published results, or download the benchmark.

March 3, 2005: The HPG Fair Use Policy has been updated.

January 31, 2005: Alternate source code is required for 330.art_m and 331.art_l in the SPEC OMP® 2001 benchmark suite in order to produce SPEC OMPM2001 & SPEC OMPL® 2001 compliant runs. Licensees of the suite should contact the SPEC office for information on obtaining this code.

2004

December 22, 2004: GPC releases the SPECapc® for Maya 6 benchmark. Read the press release, view the first set of published results, or download the benchmark.

December 8, 2004: GPC releases the SPECapc® for SolidWorks 2005 benchmark. Read the press release, view the first set of published results, or download the benchmark.

December 8, 2004: SPEC's High Performance Group (HPG) is seeking candidates for a benchmark suite based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications.

November 22, 2004: Kaivalya Dixit, long-time SPEC president, passed away on 22 November, 2004. Kaivalya touched many across the computer performance community and will be missed by all. SPEC has established a page where visitors may read remembrances of Kaivalya or share their own.

September 24, 2004: The SPECjAppServer® 2002 benchmark expiration date has been extended by three months from the original date of October 27; submissions will now be accepted for review and publication until January 26, 2005.

August 11, 2004: SPECopc® releases the SPECviewperf® 8 benchmark. Read the press release, find out more about the updated benchmark, view the first set of published results, or download a copy of the benchmark.

August 11, 2004: The SPECapc® project group demos SolidWorks 2005 benchmark at SIGGRAPH and outlines plans for updated Maya 6, Unigraphics NX2, and 3ds max 6 benchmarks.

July 26, 2004: Credit card payments for software orders can now be made online. See the order form for details.

July 8, 2004: The SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark has been updated to version 1.03. See the release notes for explanation of the changes.

June 9, 2004: SPEC/GPC releases the SPECapc® for 3ds max benchmark. Read the press release or view the first set of published results.

April 28, 2004: SPEC releases the SPECjAppServer® 2004 benchmark, a multi-tier benchmark for measuring the performance of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology-based application servers. Read the press release and the FAQ.

April 28, 2004: GPC releases the SPECapc® for Solid Edge V14 benchmark. View the first set of submitted results or download a copy.

March 25, 2004: SPEC's Open Systems Group and High Performance Group have adapted the #CPU field in results disclosures to contain additional information for systems using multi-core and multi-threaded microprocessors. Please see the FAQ entry for discussion of the new format.

2003

December 9, 2003: SPEC HPG has released a new version, V3.0, of the SPEC OMP® benchmark; please see the benchmark information for details of what's new in V3.0.

November 10, 2003: The High Performance Group (HPG) presentations at ISHPC 2003 and IPSJ SIGMPS are now available online.

November 5, 2003: The SPECopc® project group releases the SPECviewperf® 7.1.1 benchmark. The first set of results is now available.

November 5, 2003: The SPECapc® project group releases an updated spreadsheet for results calculation for the SPECapc® for Maya 5 benchmark. If you downloaded the benchmark between July 30, 2003 and November 4, 2003, please download the updated spreadsheet.

November 4, 2003: The submission deadline for the SPEC CPU® 2004 Benchmark Search Program has been extended to March 31, 2004.

October 3, 2003: The High Performance Group (HPG) will be hosting a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Tuesday, November 18, from 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM during SC2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. The session is open to all conference attendees.

September 3, 2003: Find out how you can submit your GWPG, HPG, or OSG results for publication on the SPEC web site.

July 30, 2003: The SPECapc® project group releases the new SPECapc® for Maya 5 benchmark. Get more information, view the first set of submitted results or download a copy.

July 22, 2003: SPEC has identified problems with one of the ports of the SPECweb® 99_SSL benchmark test harness. The code defects prevent the client systems from generating the correct orkload. Please see the full notice for details.

July 21, 2003: SPEC/GPC expands benchmark options for organizations outside its membership; learn more about the different submission options.

July 11, 2003: The SPECapc® for SolidWorks 2003 benchmark version 1.5 is available for download; the first set of results has also been posted.

May 20, 2003: Currently in development, SPECappPlatform is a benchmark designed to measure the scalability and performance of enterprise platforms running web services. It will include features that are typical in customers' enterprise applications, such as transactions, persistence services, web services, and messaging.

March 19, 2003: The SPECapc® project group releases the new SPECapc® for Solid Edge V12 benchmark. Get more information, view the first set of submitted results or download a copy.

March 19, 2003: The SPECopc® project group releases the SPECviewperf® 7.1 benchmark. Get more information or view the first set of submitted results. Users with an existing installation of version 7.0 may download a patch to update from 7.0 to 7.1; the full distribution is also available for download.

January 20, 2003: With the release of the SPEChpc™ 2002 benchmark, SPEC has begun the process of retiring the SPEChpc® 96 benchmark suite. Effective February 1, 2003, sales of this suite will be discontinued.

2002

December 20, 2002: The SPEChpc™ 2002 suite is now available. The benchmark improves upon and replaces the SPEChpc® 96 benchmark suite. Read the FAQ or see the first set of results.

November 21, 2002: SPEC announces the release of the SPECjAppServer® 2002 benchmark, a client/server benchmark for measuring the performance of Java Enterprise Application Servers using a subset of J2EE APIs in a complete end-to-end web application. Read the benchmark Press Release and FAQ for more information.

October 25, 2002: The High Performance Group (HPG) will be exhibiting at SC2002 in Baltimore, November 16-20. There will be a Birds of a Feather session on Tuesday, Nov. 19 from noon until 1:00 PM; the session is open to all conference attendees.

September 4, 2002: SPEC is very proud to announce the release of the SPECjAppServer® 2001 benchmark, a client/server benchmark for measuring the performance of Java Enterprise Application Servers using a subset of J2EE APIs in a complete end-to-end web application. Read the benchmark Press Release and FAQ for more information.

August 23, 2002: The SPECapc® for Pro/ENGINEER 2001 benchmark has been updated to correct a minor bug that affected the accuracy of results. The updated version is available for download, as is a patch file for previously-downloaded copies of the benchmark.

August 8, 2002: SPEC is seeking proposals for new benchmarks for the upcoming SPEC CPU® 2004 suite.

July 10, 2002: The UNIX edition of the SPECviewperf® 7.0 benchmark is now available!

June 13, 2002: SPEC has updated the Run Rules for the SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark, effective July 1, 2002. For systems that have not yet shipped, the rules have been clarified, and, in the case of beta software, significantly tightened. Read about these and other run rule updates in the "Edit History" at the top of the document.

June 3, 2002: SPEC HPG releases the SPEC OMPL® 2001 benchmark for measuring performance based on large OpenMP applications; read the press release.

May 6, 2002: The SPECopc® project group releases the SPECviewperf® 7.0 benchmark, a new version of SPEC's popular OpenGL performance benchmark; read the press release!

May 1, 2002: The SPECapc® project group releases new benchmarks for 3ds max 4.2 and SolidWorks 2001Plus. Read the press release.

April 2, 2002: The SPECweb® 99_SSL benchmark is now available. The updated benchmark adds Secure Sockets Layer support to the SPECweb® 99 benchmark. See the press release and the first set of published results.

February 28, 2002: SPEC is gathering data for the creation of user profiles for the IMAP protocol for its next benchmark. If you are interested in submitting data, please see the data collection request for information on how to participate.

2001

December 26, 2001: The SPEC CPU® Benchmark Search Program: SPEC is looking for academic and industrial input on code to be included in the next version of the SPEC CPU benchmark suite.

December 7, 2001: The SPEC CPU® 2000 V1.2 benchmark is now shipping with expanded platform support (Mac OS X, Windows XP 64-bit edition, glibc 2.2)! Also, check out the V1.2 documentation which has been put in HTML format for improved navigation and readability.

September 26, 2001: The SPECsfs® 97_R1 V3.0 benchmark, a new version of SPEC's System File Server (SFS) benchmark, is now available! This version replaces the SPECsfs® 97 V2.0 benchmark. See the press release and the first set of results.

September 26, 2001: Memory profiles are now available for the SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmarks. See descriptions of the integer and floating point benchmarks.

August 14, 2001: Additional documentation is now available on the defects identified in the SPECsfs® 97 benchmark.  See the technical whitepaper on the defects.

July 1, 2001: The SPECjbb® 2000 benchmark Run and Reporting Rules recently updated! Attention all licensees: please read the new Fair Use clause, section 4.5.

June 27, 2001: SPEC/HPG is proud to announce the release of the SPEC OMP® 2001 benchmark, a suite based on OpenMP applications for evaluating the performance of SMP systems. Read the press release and see the first set of results!

June 20, 2001: Update on availability issues; changes after a product is shipped. SPEC invites you to read an additional note on availability.

June 14, 2001: SPEC has identified significant defects in its SPECsfs® 97 benchmark suite. SPEC has suspended sales of the benchmark and is no longer accepting new submission of results for publication on SPEC's web site. Please see the full notice.

April 25, 2001: The SPECapc® project group releases the SPECapc® for Solid Edge V9 benchmark.

February 23, 2001: Presentation (abstract) on benchmarking given by the SPEC President at the Seventh International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture

February 15, 2001: A maintenance release version 1.04 of the SPECjvm® 98 benchmark is available!

February 7, 2001: The SPECapc® project group releases new benchmark for systems running 3D Studio MAX; read the press release.

January 24, 2001: SPEC is proud to announce the release of the SPECmail® 2001 benchmark for evaluating the performance of mail servers. Read the press release and FAQ, and check out the first set of results!

January 2, 2001: What's in a date? The dynamic nature of the current computer market raises a variety of issues about product availability dates. SPEC invites you to read a note regarding availability dates listed in SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark results.

2000

December 27, 2000: SPEC Ships the SPEC CPU® 2000 V1.1 benchmark!

November 30, 2000: The SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark simulation research by the University of Minnesota's ARCTiC Labs is now available.

November 7, 2000: At SC2000, SPEC HPG announces its new high performance benchmark development effort: the SPEC OMP® 2001 benchmark.

August 14, 2000: The SPECweb® 99 benchmark v1.02 Released! A maintenance release version 1.02 is now available. For more information, see the "What is Release 1.02" section of the SPECweb® 99 benchmark FAQ. Current licensees may obtain a 1.00/1.01 to 1.02 update kit via HTTP download at no charge; email the SPEC Office, and include your contact information and license number.

August 3, 2000: SPEC is pleased to announce that a workshop on the SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark will be held in conjunction with ASPLOS-IX: Ninth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.

July 18, 2000: How does SPEC develop benchmarks? For a peek at the development process, see the article "SPEC CPU® 2000: Measuring CPU Performance in the New Millennium" from Computer (the flagship member publication of the IEEE Computer Society).

June 5, 2000: SPEC is proud to announce the release of the SPECjbb® 2000 benchmark, its first server-side Java benchmark. Read the Press Release and FAQ, and see the first set of results.

April 24, 2000: SPEC retires its SPECweb® 96 benchmark.

April 21, 2000: SPEC CPU® 95 benchmark Timing Patch for use when testing under Microsoft operating system.

April 20, 2000: There has been a modification to the SPECweb® 99 benchmark run rules, shortening the general availability window from 6 months to 3 months; effective 04/20/2000. This change has been in effect for SPEC member companies since November 1999.

April 18, 2000: There has been a modification to the SPECjvm® 98 benchmark run rules, shortening the general availability window from 6 months to 3 months; effective 04/27/2000.

April 12, 2000: The SPECjbb® 2000 benchmark, a Java Business Benchmark - SPEC is developing a server-side Java benchmark emulating middle tier business logic.

April 10, 2000: SPEC CPU® 95 benchmark Retirement: With the release of the SPEC CPU® 2000 bnechmark, SPEC has begun phasing out the SPEC CPU 95 benchmark.

March 1, 2000: SPEC Headquarters has moved: current contact info.

January 6, 2000: SPEC Y2K Special: SPEC Enables Easier Academic Access To Membership And Benchmarks. SPEC incentive offers to academic and research communities are now available for the Year 2000!

1999

December 30, 1999: Just in time for Y2K, the SPEC CPU® 2000 benchmark is here! SPEC is proud to announce the release of its next-generation benchmark for CPU-intensive performance. Read the Press Release and FAQ, and see the first set of results.

November 23, 1999: The SPECweb® 99 benchmark v1.01 Released! A maintenance release version 1.01 is now available which addresses several issues found in the client test harness after the 1.00 release. For more information, see the "What is SPECweb® 99 Release 1.01" section of the FAQ. Current licensees may obtain a 1.00 to 1.01 update kit via ftp or web download at no charge; email the SPEC Office, and include your contact information and license number.

October 14, 1999: Information available on SPEC's new standardized mail server benchmark currently under development, the SPECmail® 2000 benchmark.

August 16, 1999: SPEC is proud to announce the release of its next-generation benchmark for web server performance, the SPECweb® 99 benchmark! Read the press release, and see the first set of benchmark results.

July 13, 1999: The official SPEC mirror web site is now online, hosted by the University of Pavia in Italy.

July 7, 1999: Upcoming Events: SPEC International Workshops hosted by University of Wuppertal's Department of Mathematics Scientific Computing Group and Siemens AG, Paderborn, Germany.

June 22, 1999: The SPEC FAQ has been updated with information on SPEC's Benchmarks and Year 2000 Compliance.

June 18, 1999: New information available on SPEC's next-generation benchmark for web server performance, the SPECweb® 99 benchmark!

April 23, 1999: Who makes up SPEC? A list of SPEC Members and Associates is now available - behold the SPEC Consortium!

March 18, 1999: A maintenance release Version 1.03 of the SPECjvm® 98 benchmark available!

1998

November 25, 1998: SPECclimate®, new weather forecast benchmark, in SPEC's High-Performance Computing suite.

August 19, 1998: The SPECjvm® 98 benchmark is available! SPEC has released its first benchmark for comparing Java virtual machine (JVM) client platforms. Come see the press release, initial results and more about SPECjvm98.