SPEC Calls for Benchmark Contributions
10 Nov, 2008Up to $5,000 and free benchmark software offered for accepted code.
Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), announced its SPEC CPU Benchmark Search Program, which offers rewards of up to $5,000 and a free benchmark license for application code and datasets. Applications that make it through the entire search program will be incorporated into the next major version of the SPEC CPU suite.
SPEC CPU benchmarks are quoted in new computer announcements and used to evaluate design alternatives for hardware and software technologies under development. The benchmarks provide performance metrics for comparing systems on a known compute-intensive workload, with emphasis on the system's processor, memory hierarchy, and compiler.
The company seeks benchmarks that are derived from real applications and is interested in applications that take advantage of multicore processors and parallel, multithreaded computing.
The current CPU2006 suite includes AI game theory, bioinformatics, chemistry, compilers, interpreters, data compression, fluid dynamics, physics, speech recognition, video processing, and weather prediction.
The primary selection factor in all application categories is how closely the entry reflects the state-of-the-art in its field. The application should be made compute-bound and portable across different hardware architectures and operating systems.
Proposals for new SPEC CPU benchmarks will be accepted from now until November 11, 2009.
