Letter From The President

Weaving SPECweb....

Herculean efforts of the participating SPECweb team led by Alexander Carlton (HP) are to be applauded by all of us. I want to congratulate Alex (new father) on two scores - Scott and SPECweb.

I have read lots of back-and-forth discussions and critique of the SPECweb benchmark. It is very important that the public version is a Quality Product. We are a volunteer organization and I do not want any extra burden on you because of inadequate testing or documentation.

SPEC95 has been an unqualified success. I am glad to report that vendors have reported 219 results in the second quarter of this year. So far, 567 SPEC CPU95 results have been reported! Kudos to the SPEC '95 team led by Jeff Reilly (Intel).

HPG is making progress toward its benchmarking suite and thanks to Jean Suplick (HP) and her team. We need to see some more results in our newsletter.

The GPC Group has been extremely active and its project groups will introduce two new benchmarks at SIGGRAPH '96 in New Orleans.

Thanks to Dr. Reinhold Weicker (SNI) for hosting the SPEC meeting and a workshop in Paderborn and I am sorry that I can't attend.

Dianne Rice and Kathy Powers are holding the SPEC Fort in Manassas and doing a GREAT job.

Thanks to Larry Gray (HP), SPEC is getting a much better understanding of our finances.

I want to thank all committee chairs, project leaders, tool designers and GRUNTS (people who DO THE REAL WORK) for their labor of Love-SPEColympians.

I understand that the CPU committee is already working on the SPEC CPU98 suite and we invite all CRITICS to participate in sponsoring and SPECifying (porting) new benchmarks.

Please remember - if the technology moves faster than SPEC benchmarks - we will be OBSOLETE before our time. So keep up the pace in this unending marathon.

Have a nice summer...

Regards,
Kaivalya