< 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 benchmark s 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).
Results .
SPEC also publishes a quarterly report of SPEC news and results, The SPEC Newsletter. Some issues are here .
There is a FAQ about SPEC here .
(1994-11-14)