Home Page Announcements from SPEC in 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.