The Systems Performance Evaluation Co-operative, SPEC, this week unveils its latest benchmark suite – this time for measuring the multi-tasking and multi-programming performance of its members’ hardware – that is the throughput as opposed to raw speed. SPEC’s SDM 1.0 – System Development Multi-tasking – contains two testing tools: Software Development Throughput, SDET, for evaluating commercial Unix systems, and Kenbus1 which measures Unix computers used in research and development. The tests evaluate a variety of system resources such as CPU, memory, disk input-output and operating system services while they are performing concurrent tasks such as file editing, compilation and Unix command processing. They address questions of job throughput and how many jobs or tasks can be processed in a given period of time, given a certain workload, by gradually increasing the workload on the system until a bottleneck is reached in some system component. SDET is derived from a proprietary AT&T Co benchmark – Kenbus1 comes from the Monash University Suite for benchmarking Unix systems. SDM uses a Script/Hour metric for rating throughput and maximum capacity of one system compared with another. SDM 1.0 is available now priced at $1,450 per licence.
