benchmark, body Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
A non-profit corporation registered in California formed to
"establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of
relevant
benchmarks that can be applied to the newest
generation of high-performance computers" (from SPEC's
bylaws). The founders believe that the user community will
benefit greatly from an objective series of
applications-oriented tests, which can serve as common
reference points and be considered during the evaluation
process.
SPEC develops suites of
benchmarks intended to measure
computer performance. These are available to the public for a
fee covering development and administration costs.
The current (14 Nov 94) SPEC benchmark suites are:
CINT92(CPU intensive integer benchmarks);
CFP92 (CPU intensive
floating-point benchmarks); SDM (UNIX Software Development
Workloads); SFS (System level file server (NFS) workload).
SPEC also publishes a quarterly report of SPEC news and
results, The SPEC Newsletter. Some issues are
here.
(1994-11-14)