The SPEC Cloud subcommittee released the SPEC Cloud IaaS 2018 benchmark in December 2018. The benchmark measures replicated application instances, performance, relative scalability, and mean instance provisioning time of infrastructure-as-a-service cloud implementations for both public and private clouds.
Cloud providers, users of cloud services, vendors of cloud-related hardware and software, and researchers can use the benchmark to evaluate how different implementations affect cloud performance.
SPEC Contributor Award Winners Augie Mena Nicholas Wakou
The SPEC Java subcommittee released the SPECjEnterprise 2018 Web Profile benchmark in September 2018. The benchmark measures the performance of Java 7 or later web profile application servers and supporting infrastructure.
The new workload consists of an end-to-end automotive insurance application that processes web requests and reflects the industry trend toward lightweight applications and microservices for building more flexible web applications.
SPEC Java subcommittee award winners with SPEC president David Reiner.
Members of the SPEC/GWPG committee and colleagues within their companies provided significant contributions to three major benchmark releases in 2018:
SPECviewperf 13, featuring new volume visualization viewsets for energy and medical applications, a redesigned GUI, improved scoring and reporting methods, and updated viewsets to support more recent application versions. SPECapc for SolidWorks 2017, an update of SPECapc's performance evaluation software that features order-independent transparency and full-scene anti-aliasing for higher-quality visuals.
When the SPEC CPU subcommittee started tracking recent security flaws, Jim Himer began investigating the security mitigations, then stepped in and voluntarily took the time to manually review the significant number of incoming results. Based on the issues he detected, Himer created a set of tools to enable better tracking of the security mitigations, making a valuable contribution to SPEC CPU.