The 2020 SPECtacular Award Winners

Technical Excellence
Udayan Bapat, SPEC Storage Committee

Udayan Bapat spent almost a year of engineering effort, often at night and on weekends, to implement a node-scaling feature for the SPEC SFS® storage benchmark. The feature expands the scaling from thousands to hundreds of millions of load generating processes. This is a huge leap in scaling, providing capabilities not available in any other benchmark.

 

Outstanding Leadership
Ashley Cowart, SPEC/GWPG Chair

It is expected that a group chair works to ensure all of the team members are focused, resourced and moving in the same direction, but Ashley Cowart goes far beyond those responsibilities. In addition to overseeing meetings, she is a thoughtful partner for marketing and PR efforts, a tireless proponent of SPEC/GWPG concerns, and a team leader who truly cares about each company representative.

 

Outstanding Leadership
John Henning, SPEC Fair Use Policy

John Henning has been largely responsible for developing the SPEC-wide fair-use policies that detail how to correctly and fairly compare benchmark results. Over more than a decade, he has provided updates that ensure these policies remain up-to-date, consistent and relevant, a significant contributing factor to the worldwide success of SPEC benchmarks over the years

 

Outstanding Organization
Manoj Nambiar, ICPE 2019 Co-Chair

Manoj Nambiar was instrumental in bringing the International Conference for Performance Engineering (ICPE) and a series of co-located workshops to India for the first time in 2019. It was one of the best-attended ICPE conferences in the event's 10-year history, with much higher than normal local attendance, bringing new awareness of SPEC and performance benchmarking to the region.