SPECaccel® 2023 Benchmark Suite — A Teaching Tool for High Performance Computing

By Mathew Colgrove, SPEC HPG Release Manager

I'm very pleased to announce the availability of the SPECaccel 2023 benchmark suite. A major update to the SPEC ACCEL v1.4 benchmark suite, the SPECaccel 2023 benchmark suite tests the performance of key system components, including Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), using computationally intensive parallel applications using directives, OpenACC and OpenMP target offloading APIs. The new suite uses 12 of the original v1.4 benchmarks with larger, up to 16GB, workloads to better measure modern accelerators.

EEMBC Becomes SPEC Embedded Group

By David Reiner, President

I'm extremely excited to welcome EEMBC, the 25-year-old Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, into the SPEC family as the new Embedded Group (SPEC EG). EEMBC is renowned for developing industry-standard benchmarks for measuring the performance and energy efficiency of embedded processors, providing the world's go-to benchmarks for autonomous driving, mobile imaging, machine learning inference, ultra-low power microcontrollers, the Internet of Things (IoT), and more. SPEC and EEMBC combining forces will significantly further both organizations' missions to provide global, independent and high-quality benchmarks, and provide one source for benchmarks which cover the smallest microcontroller to the largest supercomputers.

The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 Benchmark — A User's Story

By David Schmidt, Virtualization Committee Chair

John, an IT Manager at a rapidly growing financial services company, needed to specify the hardware required for the company's new private cloud deployment. His goal was to ensure a sufficient number of virtual machines to support a significant increase in the firm's development team.

John had an RFP out to three manufacturers for the servers he would need, and each had provided him with multiple test systems highlighting their proposed hardware and software solutions. Although he wanted to thoroughly stress the components of these systems to help him determine the best value, he was concerned that it could take several weeks, perhaps a month or two, to set up and run the various tools he had in his lab.

SPEC Delivers a Major Update to the SPECapc for Creo 9 Performance Benchmark

By Jessica Heerboth, SPECapc Committee Chair

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the new SPECapc for Creo 9 benchmark, with updated models to support computing systems running the PTC Creo 9 3D CAD solution, now featuring generative design, real-time simulation, advanced manufacturing, industrial IoT and augmented reality. This major update to the benchmark also includes new and updated CPU and GPU test cases.

The benchmark has undergone a significant transformation with three major upgrades since it first released for Creo 3, and we are particularly gratified with being able to work directly with PTC on this update. In addition to new test cases that exercise features added to Creo over the last few releases, we have significantly enhanced the benchmark's interface to make it far more user-friendly.

The SPECviewperf® Benchmark — A User's Story

By Ross Cunniff, SPECgpc Committee Chair

Emma is a tech enthusiast who develops product designs and plays games on the same workstation, which includes a CPU and GPU that were mid-range when she bought the system in 2018. Over the years, however, she's been far less pleased with the performance, noticing significant lag when trying to manipulate models in SolidWorks, the 2D and 3D product development application that engineers and designers use to create and collaborate on innovative product designs.

When she and a group of friends began designing a high-tech go-kart, things started to get painful. Every time they tried to increase the complexity of the model by exploring how different king pins and rack and pinion gear ratios would work, the system just bogged down. The processes would complete eventually, but it just wasn't practical to keep using her existing rig for the go-kart project.

SPEC Member Professor Lizy Kurian John Receives Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award

By John Henning, SPEC CPU Committee Secretary

I am extremely pleased to congratulate Professor Lizy Kurian John, IEEE Micro Editor-in-Chief and Truchard Foundation Chair at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, on receiving the Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award. Professor John is well known within SPEC for her contributions to SPEC CPU, and in turn, her contribution to new CPU processor design.

New chip designs take years, requiring very large engineering investments, and SPEC benchmarks provide essential guidance for this engineering work. Dr. John has collaborated with the SPEC CPU Committee since 2004. SPEC engineers have provided her with low-level hardware profiles and she, along with her PhD students, have applied Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to produce benchmark "clusters" that SPEC has considered when selecting which benchmarks to include in SPEC products.

It's a Wrap — Successful 14th Annual ICPE 2023 Marks Return of In-Person Event

By Petr Tuma, ICPE 2023 PC Co-Chair, and Marco Vieira, CPE 2023 General Co-Chair

We are very pleased to report on the success of ICPE 2023 — the 14th annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering — which took place in Coimbra, Portugal, during April. The conference is an annual event where researchers and practitioners meet to present and discuss the latest results from both industry and academia related to software and systems performance.

This year's event marked an exciting return to an in-person conference, and nearly 150 attendees enjoyed three keynote speeches, 28 research presentations, seven data challenge presentations, a range of workshops and more.

SPEC Adds Benchmark Search Program for Graphics and Workstation Performance Group

By Jessica Heerboth, SPECapc Committee Chair

I'm excited to announce that SPEC has kicked-off a third Benchmark Search Program. As noted in a blog post about our first two Search Programs, SPEC believes that the most effective computing benchmarks are based on how various user communities run actual applications. To enable us to do this, Search Programs encourage users outside of SPEC to contribute applications, workloads, or models that will enable us to build more comprehensive and more applicable benchmarks, which in turn will better serve their communities. The new Benchmark Search Program is for the SPEC Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG).

SPECapc for Maya 2023 Benchmark – Measuring Performance of the Latest High Performance Workstations

By Jessica Heerboth, SPECapc Committee Chair

In October of last year, SPEC released the SPECapc® for Maya 2023 benchmark, which offers application performance measurement for workstations running Autodesk Maya 2023. Maya is the 3D animation and visual effects software used by top artists in the industry to create realistic characters and stunning visual effects.

Workstation hardware performance has reached unprecedented levels, and the updates in the SPECapc for Maya 2023 benchmark include new and more complicated workloads and larger models compared to the previous version. With the SPECapc for Maya 2023 benchmark, workstation vendors will be better able to assess and compare their ability to meet the performance needs of Maya 2023 users, while users will be better able to determine the best workstations to purchase for their needs. The demand for the SPECapc for Maya 2023 benchmark is reflected in its growing popularity. More than 100 organizations have already downloaded the benchmark, with 61 downloads in just the first 10 weeks of 2023.

Evolving Trends in Cloud Market Call for New Benchmarks

By Sundar Iyengar, SPEC Cloud Committee Chair and Ramesh Illikkal, Committee Member

Over the last few years, the cloud market has grown in its depth and breadth of offerings. From its simple beginnings, when on-premises workloads and applications could be run on instances rented on the cloud, the market has moved to designing cloud-native applications that run on disaggregated hardware.

Software architecture is shifting from monolithic architecture to distributed microservices architecture, increasing workload complexity. The underlying cloud system architecture is becoming more heterogenous and disaggregated, comprising a mix of CPUs, infrastructure processing units and special-purpose accelerators. The confluence of these trends has led to new urgencies for innovations in the underlying infrastructure. Unfortunately, the benchmarks that are being widely used by the industry to drive architecture features and software/hardware co-optimizations have been left behind in this fast-paced transformation.

SPEC Search Programs — How You Can Contribute to the Future of Computing

By Mathew Colgrove, SPEC Communications Committee Chair

SPEC, a nonprofit organization, develops benchmarks that evaluate the performance and energy consumption of the newest generation of computing systems. These benchmarks help hardware vendors gauge how their products perform against the competition and target the areas that need improvement. They also enable buyers to make reliable comparisons between products, so they can purchase the right ones for their needs.

SPEC believes that the most effective computing benchmarks are developed based on how various user communities run actual applications. To enable us to do this, SPEC regularly conducts Search Programs that encourage those outside of SPEC to contribute applications, workloads, or models that will enable us to build more comprehensive and more applicable benchmarks that will better serve their communities.