The SPEC Research Group (RG) is a new group within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) established to serve as a platform for collaborative research efforts in the area of quantitative system evaluation and analysis, fostering the interaction between industry and academia in the field. The scope of the group includes computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general, considering both classical performance metrics such as response time, throughput, scalability and efficiency, as well as other non-functional system properties included under the term dependability, e.g., availability, reliability, and security.

The conducted research efforts span the design of metrics for system evaluation as well as the development of methodologies, techniques and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems.

The High Performance Computing (HPC) group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI) at University of Basel (www.dmi.hpc.unibas.ch) represents our university in the SPEC RG since January 2019. Prof. Florina Ciorba is the primary representative for the visibility of Uni Basel in SPEC RG. 

The HPC Group at DMI collaborates with the SPEC RG in an effort to develop new research benchmarks that can stress different capabiities of the system through the use of scientific computing codes. The goal is to employ existing load balancing solutions not only to existing benchmarks but to create benchmarks of interest for the scientific community.