New Research Group of SPEC publicly announced

The new Research Group (RG) of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), co-founded by Samuel Kounev and Kai Sachs, was publicly announced today

The new Research Group (RG) of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), co-founded by Samuel Kounev and Kai Sachs, was publicly announced today - the official press release can be found at: http://www.spec.org/news/rgpressrelease.html

As part of the first elections conducted in the beginning of March, the following people were elected to serve as officers of the SPEC Research Group:

Chair: Samuel Kounev, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Vice-Chair: Kai Sachs, SAP AG

Secretary: Seetharami R. Seelam, IBM Watson Research Center

Release Manager: Michael Kuperberg, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

SPEC RG (http://research.spec.org) is a new group within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) created to promote innovative research on benchmarking methodologies and tools facilitating the development of benchmark suites and performance analysis frameworks for established and newly emerging technologies. It is designed to encourage exchange among representatives from academia, industry and research institutes. The scope of the conducted research efforts includes techniques and tools for performance measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems. While the focus is on performance, other extra-functional system properties such as scalability, availability, cost and energy efficiency are considered as well.

A major component of the RG is the development of standard scenarios and workloads – called research benchmarks – for emerging technologies and applications. Benchmarks from the research group are intended primarily for in-depth analysis and evaluation of early prototypes and research results. This differentiates them from conventional benchmarks used for direct comparison and marketing of existing products.

Other planned activities of the RG include publishing a newsletter and journal, establishing a portal for benchmarking-related resources, recognizing outstanding contributions to benchmarking research, and organizing conferences and workshops.

Members of the SPEC Research Group include AMD; Charles University; Ghent University; HP; IBM; Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; Intel; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; NICTA; Northeastern University (Boston, MA); 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.

More information can be found at http://research.spec.org.