SPEC Y2K Special

* This offer is no longer valid: expired as of 12/31/2000 *

SPEC Enables Easier Academic Access To Membership And Benchmarks

SPEC Offers Incentives To The Academic Community

Computer system performance evaluation is an intriguing, complex and rewarding endeavor. SPEC and its members want to expand the depth and breadth of performance evaluation by encouraging more active use and evaluation of SPEC benchmarks from the academic and research communities.

To attract and maintain SPEC's academic members (Associates), SPEC has reduced Associate dues to $500 for the Year 2000 and will waive the initiation fee of $500 for institutions new to SPEC. SPEC may also approve dues reduction for any current SPEC Associate that has demonstrated significant active participation in SPEC committees. This offer expires December 31, 2000.

As an incentive for academic use of SPEC's benchmark products, SPEC will donate any two of its current OSG or HPG suites to any university computer science or computer engineering department upon written request by the department chair. The request should be made on department letterhead, signed by the chair, and mailed to the SPEC Office.

For more information about these offers, contact SPEC by e-mail at info@spec.org.

SPEC Overview

SPEC, The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, is an industry consortium, dedicated to the creation of fair and realistic tools for performance evaluation of modern computer systems. Founded in 1988, SPEC and its benchmark suites such as SPEC CPU95, have become globally accepted as the standard measures of performance for a wide range of open systems from workstations to high end server systems. Information about SPEC, its benchmarks and benchmark results is freely available via the world-wide-web at http://www.spec.org.

The SPEC groups produce both component and systems level benchmarks for systems as diverse as graphics workstations, multi-user symmetric multiprocessor servers, distributed memory parallel systems, and traditional vector and vector parallel supercomputers. Popular server application areas such as file, mail and web servers are addressed. Graphics and multimedia benchmarks evaluate performance of 2D and 3D graphics intensive environments with actual applications. All of the tools and results produced have value to both the user and vendor communities.

SPEC is organized as three groups, each engaged in the development of system performance evaluation tools, benchmarks, for specific systems or operating environments. SPEC members pay dues based on their group affiliation. Member dues support the operations of SPEC and its web site.

SPEC Open Systems Group (OSG) - Open Systems Workstations and Servers
SPEC High Performance Group (HPG) - High Performance Computing
SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (GPCG) - Graphics and Multimedia

Information on membership can be found in SPEC's FAQ.