SPEC Calls for Benchmark Contributions

By DE Editors

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC; Warrenton, VA) is offering rewards of up to $5,000 and a free benchmark license for application code and datasets accepted under its benchmark search program. Applications that make it through the entire search program will be incorporated into the next major version of the SPEC CPU suite.

SPEC CPU benchmarks are among the most widely used measures of computing power. They are quoted in new computer announcements and used to evaluate design alternatives for hardware and software technologies under development. The benchmarks provide performance metrics for comparing systems on a known compute-intensive workload, with emphasis on the system's processor, memory hierarchy and compiler.

SPEC seeks benchmarks that are derived from real applications, but it is not necessary for an application developer to contribute an entire commercial code base. SPEC is interested in applications that take advantage of multi-core processors and parallel, multi-threaded computing.

SPEC's current CPU2006 suite includes the following applications: AI game theory, bioinformatics, chemistry, compilers, interpreters, data compression, fluid dynamics, physics, speech recognition, video processing and weather prediction. The primary selection factor in all application categories is how closely the entry reflects the state of the art in its field. It is also important that the application can be made compute-bound and portable across different hardware architectures and operating systems.

For more information on CPU2006, visit SPEC.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.