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SPECpower
Resources
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SPEC Power Committee
This page provides information on the
SPEC Power Committee. If you are searching for information on the
SPECpower_ssj2008
benchmark, click here.
If you are searching for information on SERTTM,
click here.
About SPEC and the SPECpower Committee
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) was formed by
computer industry participants in 1988 to establish industry standards
for measuring compute performance. SPEC has since become the
largest and most influential benchmark consortium. Its mission is
to ensure that the marketplace has a fair and useful set of metrics to
analyze the newest generation of IT Equipment.
The SPEC community has developed more than 30 industry-standard
benchmarks for system performance evaluation in a variety of
application areas and provided thousands of benchmark licenses to
companies, resource centers, and educational institutions
globally. Organizations using these benchmarks have published
more than 20,000 peer-reviewed performance reports.
SPEC has a long history of designing, developing, and releasing
industry-standard computer system performance benchmarks in a range of
industry segments, plus peer-reviewing the results of benchmark
runs. Performance benchmarking and the necessary work to develop
and release new benchmarks can lead to disagreements among
participants. Therefore, SPEC has developed an operating
philosophy and range of normative behaviors that encourage cooperation
and fairness amongst diverse and competitive organizations.
More detailed information about SPEC maybe found here. Information on
joining SPEC can also be found here.
The increasing demand for energy-efficient IT Equipment has resulted in
the need for power and performance benchmarks. In response, the SPEC
community established SPECpower, an initiative to augment existing
industry standard benchmarks with a power/energy measurement.
Leading engineers and scientists in the fields of benchmark development
and energy efficiency made a commitment to tackle this task.
The SPECpower committee currently has several focus areas:
- The Power and Performance Benchmark Methodology document
- The SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark (released)
- The PTDaemon power measurement harness
- The SERT tool (in development)
About the Power and Performance Benchmark Methodology
The Power
and Performance Benchmark Methodology document is intended for
performance benchmark designers and implementers who want to integrate
a power component into their benchmark. The document may also serve as
an introduction to those who need to understand the relationship
between power and performance metrics in computer systems
benchmarks. The assumption is that the business model and
benchmark application are already selected and may already be
implemented. Guidance is provided for including power metrics in
existing benchmarks, as well as altering existing benchmarks and
designing new ones to provide a more complete view of energy
consumption. Benchmarks already using this methodology document
include: SPECpower_ssj2008,
SPECweb2009, and SPECvirt_sc2010.
About SPECpower_ssj2008
The
development of the first industry-standard benchmark that
measures the power and performance characteristics of server-class
compute equipment started on January 26th 2006. In December of
2007, SPECpower_ssj2008
was released, which exercises the CPUs, caches,
memory hierarchy and the scalability of shared memory processors on
multiple load-levels. The benchmark runs on a wide variety of
operating systems and hardware architectures. In version 1.10,
which was released on April 15th 2009, SPEC augmented SPECpower_ssj2008
with multi-node support (e.g., blade-support).
About PTDaemon
SPEC’s power
temperature
daemon (also known as PTDaemon) is used by benchmarks to offload
the work of controlling a power analyzer or temperature sensor during
measurement intervals to a system other than the SUT. It hides
the details of different power analyzer interface protocols and
behaviors from the benchmark software, presenting a common TCP-IP-based
interface that can be readily integrated into different benchmark
harnesses. Benchmarks already using PTDaemon include:
SPECpower_ssj2008, SPECweb2009, and SPECvirt_sc2010.
About SERT
The EPA’s Energy Star Development Team is currently working on Version
2.0 of their Computer Server Specification. Version 2.0 aims to
evolve the program by adding a means to measure the overall efficiency
of the server while it is performing actual computing work via an
Active Mode Efficiency Rating Tool.
The SPECpower committee is currently working on the design,
implementation and delivery of the
Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT)TM
next generation tool set that will measure and evaluate the energy
efficiency of computer servers. If you would like to find more
information on SERT, click here.
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