Last updated: 9 August 2006 jh/mc/jr
(To check for possible updates to this document, please
see http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/Docs/ )
To run and install SPEC CPU2006, you will need:
A computer system running UNIX, Microsoft Windows, or Mac OS X. The benchmark suite includes a toolset. Pre-compiled versions of the toolset are provided that are expected to work with:
For systems not listed in above, such as earlier or later versions of the above systems, you may find that the tools also work, but SPEC has not tested them. Windows systems that are not based on NT, such as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, will definitely NOT work. Please see the Portability Notes below.
In addition to the above list, there are several toolsets that are provided as a courtesy. These toolsets are expected to work, but have been tested much less extensively. More importantly, the benchmarks themselves have not been ported to these systems, so if you use one of them, you should be prepared to spend time on the porting effort. Please see the Portability Notes below.
A DVD drive
Memory: typically 1GB on 32-bit systems, exclusive of OS/overhead; but more may be required:
The CPU2006 benchmarks (code + workload) have been designed to fit within about 1GB of physical memory, which is within the capabilities of systems that allow user applications to use 32 bits of virtual memory (i.e. 4GB of virtual address space).
SPEC is aware that some systems that are commonly described as "32-bit" may provide a smaller number of bits to user applications, for example if one or more bits are reserved to privileged code. SPEC is also aware that there are many ways to spend profligate amounts of virtual memory. Therefore, although 32-bit systems are within the design center for the CPU2006 suites, SPEC does not guarantee any particular memory size for the benchmarks, nor that they will necessarily fit on all systems that are described as 32-bit.
The 1GB of RAM for the benchmarks (in 32-bit mode) does not include space needed for the operating system and other non-SPEC tasks on the system under test.
Typically, 64-bit environments will require 2GB for some of the benchmarks in the suite.
Attempting to run the suite with insufficient memory is strongly discouraged, as you will end up measuring the speed of your paging file, not the speed of your system running compute intensive workloads.
More memory will be needed if you run multi-copy SPECrates: generally 1GB for 32-bit, or 2GB for 64-bit, for each copy you plan to run.
Disk space:
Typically you will need at least 8GB of disk space to install and run the suite. However, space needs can vary greatly depending upon your usage and system. The 8GB estimate is based on the following:
Note: If you plan to run SPECrate with multiple copies, estimate an additional 2 to 3GB of disk space per copy. Note that SPECrate must be run using a single file system, so large runs will likely require some form of hardware or software disk striping.
Minimum requirement: It is possible to run with about 5GB of disk space if: you are running only single-CPU metrics; you delete the build directories after the build is done; and you clean run directories between tests. See the discussion of disk space in runspec.html for more information about managing disk space.
Note: links to SPEC CPU2006 documents on this web page assume that you are reading the page from a directory that also contains the other SPEC CPU2006 documents. If by some chance you are reading this web page from a location where the links do not work, try accessing the referenced documents at one of the following locations:
Since SPEC supplies only source code for the benchmarks, you will need either:
--or--
Please notice that you cannot generate a valid CPU2006 result unless you meet all of requirement 5.a.1 or 5.a.2 or 5.b. For example, if you are attempting to build the floating point suite but lack a Fortran-95 compiler, you will not be able to measure a SPECfp2006 result.
SPEC CPU2006 is a source code benchmark, and portability of that source code is one of the chief goals of SPEC CPU2006. SPEC has invested substantial effort to make the benchmarks portable across a wide variety of hardware architectures, operating systems, and compilers. During the development of SPEC CPU2006 testing was done on over 15 different hardware architectures and operating systems (including many variations of Unix, Linux, Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS).
Despite SPEC's testing efforts, certain portability problems are likely to arise from time to time. For example:
Some platforms may not have a Fortran-95 compiler available.
Some older compilers may not include all the features needed to run the entire suite.
Sometimes, a new release of a compiler or operating system may introduce new behavior that is incompatible with one of the benchmarks.
If you visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ and look up results for SPEC CPU2006, you will find combinations of OS and compiler versions that are known to work. For example, if a vendor reports a SPECint2006 result on the SuperHero 4 using SuperHero Unix V4.0 with SuperHero C V4.0 and SuperHero C++ V4.0, you may take that as an assertion by the vendor that the listed versions of Unix, C, and C++ will successfully compile and run the SPEC CINT2006 suite on the listed machine.
For systems that have not (yet) been reported by vendors, SPEC can provide limited technical support to resolve portability issues. See techsupport.html for information.
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