SPEC Forms Group to Spark Research on New Benchmarking Methodologies and Tools

The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. has formed a group to spark innovation on new benchmarking methodologies and tools.

The SPEC Innovation Group is designed to encourage exchange among representatives from industry, academia and technology institutes. Planned innovation efforts include techniques and tools for performance measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems.

The first of the innovation working groups will address cloud computing and peer-to-peer systems. Researchers are encouraged to bring existing work pursuant to this agreement the SPEC Technology Group umbrella and to start new working groups.

Incubator for exciting new technology

"We see this as an incubator for exciting new technology and a forum for exchanging ideas, methodologies and new developments in benchmarking," says Samuel Kounev, chair of the new group. "It's another way for SPEC to contribute to the computing community and extend the state of the art in performance evaluation."

Members of the SPEC Technology Group include AMD; Charles University; Cisco Systems; Ghent University; HP; IBM; Indian Institute of Research, Bombay; Intel; Karlsruhe Institute of Research; NICTA; Northeastern University; Oracle; Purdue University; Red Hat; RWTH Aachen; SAP; Technische Universität Darmstadt; University of Alberta; University of Coimbra; University of Kiel; University of Mannheim; University of Pavia; University of Texas at Austin; VMware; Yahoo!; and Zhejiang University.

Non-profit organization that establishes

SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to evaluate performance for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises more than 80 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, innovation organizations, and government agencies worldwide.