SPEC Research Group Vice Chair André van Hoorn, a longtime member of our community, passed away on Saturday, June 8, 2024. André is survived by his wife, Merle, and their three children aged 11, 7, and 3.
André has been an invaluable member of our community and contributor to both SPEC RG and ICPE since their inception back in 2010. Over the years, he has served in numerous roles including RG Vice Chair (since 2015), Co-Founder and Chair of the RG DevOps Performance Working Group (since 2014), RG Publicity Officer (2013-2015), and RG Steering Committee Member (since 2014).
The SPEC community mourns the passing of Julie Reilly, who died from an unexpected complication following a successful surgery.
Julie was a long-time member of the SPEC community and an invaluable contributor to the SPEC CPU Committee. Starting in 2004, she volunteered as a supporting contributor, handling beta testing and document review for the SPEC CPU 2006 and SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suites.
In 2014, Julie also began serving as a volunteer editorial reviewer.
The SPEC community mourns the passing of Dr. Reinhold Weicker. He died peacefully on March 23, 2018, surrounded by family.
Reinhold was the author in 1984 of the Dhrystone benchmark, the first portable program representing a broad range of real-world applications. Dhrystone was designed based on programming language features across applications in FORTRAN, PL/1, SAL, Algol 68, and Pascal. Its simplicity and widespread availability led to a rapid accumulation of test results across many different computer systems.
The computer performance benchmarking community mourns the loss of Alan Adamson, a member of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) Board of Directors. Alan died in his sleep the night of October 31, 2012.
Alan Adamson came to SPEC as an IBM representative specializing in compiler and Java performance. Within a short period of time, he became vitally involved in almost every aspect of SPEC work. After his retirement from IBM in 2009, he continued to work unpaid for a wide range of SPEC activities.
SPEC is mourning the loss of Larry Gray, the long-time Treasurer of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) and technical contributor in many different benchmark areas, who passed away on January 30, 2011.
Larry was involved with SPEC from its inception and has worked on so many benchmarks that neither memory nor archives can serve to list them all. As SPEC’s long serving treasurer, Larry helped guide us to our current financially solid position, with a fine professional staff amplifying the efforts of our volunteers, and with the ability safely to invest in strategic initiatives to advance SPEC’s mission.
Among the many people guiding SPEC through its early years was a Silicon Valley icon known for his grand sense of humor as much as for his legal acumen.
Tom, after a long and valorous battle, succumbed to cancer on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005.
Tom was, for several decades, the go to legal person for startups and spinoffs, and to the everlasting benefit of SPEC, experienced with industry consortia. References to Tom and his involvement in the fortunes and failures of Silicon Valley appear in several books.
The computer performance benchmarking community is mourning the loss of Kaivalya Dixit, long-time president of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC). Dixit died at age 62 on November 22.
Considered “Mr. SPEC” by peers and colleagues, Dixit headed the non-profit group since 1990. Along with others, Dixit codified the SPEC methodology for creating objective, repeatable benchmarks that reflect computing use in the real world. Under his leadership, SPEC produced more than two-dozen products used worldwide to evaluate performance for CPU, graphics and applications, high-performance computing, Java client/servers, mail servers, network file systems, and web servers.