The 2023 SPECtacular Award Winners

Over the past five years, André Bauer has been actively involved in two SPEC Research Group (RG) Working Groups — RG Predictive Data Analytics and RG Cloud — making significant contributions in both. André successfully contributed to and led several research activities within these groups, which resulted in a number of high-quality computer science publications to the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) Proceedings, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), and ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems (ToMPECS).

In May 2021, Alex Shows was nominated as the inaugural Chair of the Board Communications (Comms) Committee, and he took on this role with his typical gusto, charm and tenacity. His leadership has been instrumental in progressing the Committee’s goal of shining a clearer light on the work SPEC does to further state-of-the-art performance benchmarking. This includes working closely with SPEC’s PR/Marketing representative and the Comms committee members, launching the SPEC blog, supporting the launch of the new SPEC newsletter, and ensuring Comms services are available to all Committees.

The release of the SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition benchmark would not have happened without the tireless effort of Ross Cunniff. He identified the need for the benchmark, took leadership of the project, and pushed it through to completion, pulling in resources to get the job done. Ross brings a critical deep understanding of the workstation market, who the users are, what their challenges are, and why a Linux version is so important to both users and vendors.

As a member of the SPEC CPU Subcommittee, Frédérique Silber-Chaussumier has taken ownership of six difficult benchmark candidates for SPEC CPUv8 — each a challenge in and of itself, and all important to the success of CPUv8. The very first — and the largest — benchmark in the original 1989 SPECmark suite was 001.gcc with 139,000 lines of code. Now, 33 years later, for its distant descendant, 721.gcc, this project leader wrestles with nearly 4 million lines of code.

In 2022, Brian Bothwell was involved in an initiative that had a significant impact on all three Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) subcommittees. He architected and championed a unified GUI framework that would create a consistent user interface for all GWPG benchmarks, as well as provide a new release control and software development model. This is a major initiative that will significantly accelerate benchmark development, increase benchmark ease-of-use and ease-of-installation, and further SPEC’s reputation for professionalism among the user community.

As the 2022 chair of the Graphics and Workstation Performance Group’s (GWPG) SPECapc Committee, Trey Morton continually pushed to build momentum to increase application benchmark output, knowing that if he took his foot off the pedal it would be too easy for the group to fall behind. His efforts came to fruition with an unprecedented five benchmark releases and updates, including for 3ds Max, Maya and SolidWorks. This was a monumental feat, given the small group of people who are actively involved in benchmark development.