Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

From Free net encyclopedia

Spec redirects here. Spec can also mean Specification.

Spec is also the nickname of The Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper for Columbia University.

The spectrum of a ring is often written as Spec(R).

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is a non-profit organization that aims to produce fair, impartial and meaningful benchmarks for computers. SPEC was founded in 1988 and is financed by its member organizations which include all leading computer and software manufacturers. SPEC benchmarks are widely used today in evaluating the performance of computer systems; the results are published on the SPEC web site.

The benchmarks aim to test "real-life" situations. SPECweb2005, for example, tests web server performance by performing various types of parallel HTTP requests, and SPEC CPU tests CPU performance by measuring the run time of several programs such as the compiler gcc and the chess program crafty. The various tasks are assigned weights based on their perceived importance; these weights are used to compute a single benchmark result in the end.

SPEC benchmarks are written in a platform neutral programming language (usually C or Fortran), and the interested parties may compile the code using whatever compiler they prefer for their platform, but may not change the code. Manufacturers have been known to optimize their compilers to improve performance of the various SPEC benchmarks.

In order to use a benchmark, a license has to be purchased from SPEC; the costs vary from test to test with a typical range from several hundred to several thousand dollars. This pay for license model has been criticized as being in violation of the GPL as it includes software that is licensed by the GPL.

1 Benchmarks
2 External links

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Benchmarks

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Current

SPEC CPU2000, combined performance of CPU, memory and compiler
- CINT2000 ("SPECint"), testing integer arithmetic, with programs such as compilers, interpreters, word processors, chess programs etc.
- CFP2000 ("SPECfp"), testing floating point performance, with physical simulations, 3D graphics, image processing, computational chemistry etc.
SPECweb2005, web server PHP and/or JSP performance.
SPECviewperf, performance of an OpenGL 3D graphics system, tested with various rendering tasks from real applications
SPECapc, performance of several 3D-intensive popular applications on a given system
SPEC HPC2002, testing high end parallel computing systems with applications such as weather prediction and computational chemistry
SPEC OMP, testing high end shared memory multiprocessor systems with OpenMP applications similar to those used for SPEC CPU2000
SPEC JVM98, performance of a java client system running a Java virtual machine
SPECjAppServer2001, performance of a server-side Java system based on J2EE
SPECjAppServer2002
SPECjAppServer2004
SPEC JBB2000, performance of a server-side Java system
SPEC MAIL2001, performance of a mail server, testing SMTP and POP protocols
SPEC SFS97_R1, NFS file server throughput and response time

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Future

SPECappPlatform, performance of web enterprise platforms (such as Java EE and .NET)
SPECimap2003, performance of an enterprise level mail server, testing SMTP and IMAP4 protocols
SPEC CPU2004

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