SPEC Ships CPU2000 V1.1

As of 12/27/2000, SPEC is shipping Version 1.1 of its popularCPU2000 benchmark suite. Current licensees of SPEC CPU2000 1.0 will receive a new 1.1 CDROM, free-of-charge; SPEC will ship these within two to four weeks.

SPEC CPU2000 V1.1 addresses several issues and bugs that were discovered in V1.0. All of the changes are meant to improve the usability and portability of the CPU2000 tools and benchmarks. The workloads have not changed, and results generated with V1.1 are comparable to results with Version 1.0 (on its results pages, SPEC will not distinguish between 1.0 and 1.1 results).

Here are a few examples of changes in V1.1; for more details about these changes, and many other changes, please see changes_in_V1.1.txt.

• New features have been added, such as the ability to optionally preserve more information about runs, by not deleting run directories (see section V. of changes_in_V1.1.txt); and a feature to submit jobs to nodes of a cluster (see section I.C.5.a.(2) of config.txt.)
• The SPEC tools were improved to speed up the validation of benchmarks after they have been run, especially for benchmarks with large output files, such as 177.mesa. This reduces the overall time it takes to generate results.
• The documentation has been expanded, and a new document is provided for those who may prefer to work directly with the benchmarks, instead of using the SPEC-supplied tools -- execution_without_SPEC_tools.txt
  Note: the SPEC tools must be used if you are doing an official run, as explained in the run rules, section 2.0.2.
• Various bugfixes were made, such as:
  • On NT, SPECrate mode works now with more than 4 users.
  • LAPACK V3 can now be used with 178.galgel
  • Several benchmarks have been debugged for use with additional compilers or operating system versions.

The above is only a sample of the changes. Please see changes_in_V1.1.txt for details of these and many more changes.

Cautions

Please note the following cautions:

• Please check whether you need to supply a math library for 252.eon. See section IV. of changes_in_V1.1.txt
• Unix users should note that the installation procedure has been changed to be much more quiet, as described in section III of changes_in_V1.1.txt
• A list of known bugs or limitations may be found on the SPEC web site, as http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/docs/errata.txt. The list on the web site is more recent than the copy on the V1.1 CD.