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GAINESVILLE, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has formed a new group to research and recommend application workloads for benchmarking cloud computing performance.

The group functions under SPECs Open Systems Group (OSG) and is working in cooperation with other SPEC committees and subcommittees to define cloud benchmark methodologies, determine and recommend application workloads, identify cloud metrics for existing SPEC benchmarks, and develop new cloud benchmarks.

Current participants in OSGCloud include AMD, Dell, IBM, Ideas International, Intel, Karlshuhe Institute of Technology, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. Long-time SPEC benchmark developer Yun Chao is a supporting contributor. The group collaborates with the SPEC Research Cloud group, which is working on gaining a broader understanding of cloud behavior and performance issues.

A major shift

While cloud performance takes into account many of the same characteristics as current SPEC benchmarks throughput, response time and power, for example it also brings into play new metrics such as elasticity, defined as how quickly a service can adapt to changing customer needs.

Cloud computing is on the rise and represents a major shift in how servers are used and how their performance is measured, says Rema Hariharan, chair of OSGCloud. We want to assemble the best minds to define this space, create workloads, augment existing SPEC benchmarks, and develop new cloud-based benchmarks.

Call for wider participation

The group targets three types of users for the workloads and benchmarks it will create:

OSGCloud has already developed a 50-page report that details its objectives, benchmark considerations, characteristics of a cloud benchmark, and tools for creating metrics.

Read the original here:
SPEC Forms Cloud Benchmarking Group