Server Performance — At what cost?

By Klaus-Dieter Lange, SPECpower Committee Chair

From their hardware and firmware, to their software and applications, modern servers are increasingly complex. When one considers the incredible variety of computational and data-centric tasks that servers are designed and deployed to provide, the provisioning of these machines cannot be done properly or completely without accounting for energy efficiency. Beyond the initial hardware and software investments, beyond the costs to house these servers, what level of power-efficient performance can be expected and how does that compare across different architectures and configurations?

SPEC's SERT suite is the industry’s answer to questions of server efficiency. The SERT suite combines worklets which exercise the critical components within a server, scaling in similar ways to that of real-world production applications, while measuring both performance and power consumption.

By combining Java-based worklets which maximize compatibility across disparate architectures, with SPEC's PTDaemon interface, a proven power measurement and instrumentation framework, the SERT suite makes server efficiency measurement and ISO-compliant standardized reporting easy!

Released in June, the newest update to the SERT 2.04 Suite adds support for the latest ARM processors from Ampere, Fujitsu and Marvell. Additional support has been documented for making it even easier to set up a JVM and output ISO-compliant reports. Combined with even more user interface optimizations, this latest update continues to refine the industry standard for measuring and reporting server efficiency.

Making the best provisioning decisions for your server installation may not be easy but with SPEC's SERT suite measuring the efficiency of those servers will always be.

[Back to SPEC blog]