rnovak@mips.COM (Robert E. Novak) (01/27/90)
From: rnovak@mips.COM (Robert E. Novak) What is SPEC? SPEC is the Systems Performance Evaluation Cooperative. More simply stated, it is a consortium of computer manufacturers that are concerned about a level playing field on which both customers and vendors can measure computer system performance. SPEC's mission is to create a realistic yardstick to measure the performance of advanced computer systems. The current membership list includes 16 companies: AT&T, Control Data Corp., Data General, Digital Equipment Corp., DuPont, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Intergraph, MIPS Computer Systems, Motorola, Multiflow, Solbourne, Stardent, Sun and Unisys. Several other companies have also made commitments to join. What has SPEC done? SPEC has released a suite of 10 benchmarks that are availabe for a nominal cost to anyone. The SPEC Benchmark Release 1.0 is only the first of many suites which will encompass a broad spectrum of tests of performance. All 10 of these programs are primarily CPU-intensive in nature. Half of the programs are Fortran floating point intensive applications and the other half are C language integer intensive applications. Despite the overall CPU intensity of these applications, a number of I/O side-effects and cache organization impacts have been noted with these applications. For example, the espresso, fpppp, and tomcatv applications proved to be very memory intensive. One measure of that intensity is that only xxxx of the published performance numbers to date have been run on less than 16 megabytes of memory. The gcc application (a portable C compiler) actually performs a healthy amount of I/O, but the code generator is so CPU intensive, that it dominates the performance characteristics of this application. The SPEC applications represent a large body of code (over 14 megabytes) which span a range of application arenas. The membership to SPEC is open to any interested company. SPEC is not devoted to any single architecture nor any particular philosophy of computing systems. SPEC has created a framework in which a wide variety of applications can be tested by a very large audience of computer users. For more information on SPEC, please contact SPEC c/o Waterside Associates 1-415-792-2901 or shanley@cup.portal.com or mendoza@cup.portal.com -- Robert E. Novak MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. {ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!rnovak 928 E. Arques Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 rnovak@mips.COM (rnovak%mips.COM@ames.arc.nasa.gov) +1 408 991-0402 Volume-Number: Volume 18, Number 37