SPEC’s High-Performance Group (SPEC/HPG) announced last night at the SC06 conference that it has lowered the price of its SPEC OMP2001 performance evaluation software to $550 for commercial organizations and $250 for non-profit and educational institutions. The former pricing was $2,500 for commercial concerns and $750 for non-profit/educational. “The use of multicore systems is increasing dramatically at both the departmental and personal levels,” says Ron Lieberman, interim SPEC/HPG chair. “The new pricing makes SPEC OMP2001 more accessible to multi-core users who want a standardized tool for measuring performance on the newest generation of SMP (shared memory multi-processor) systems.” SPEC OMP2001 is a benchmark suite for evaluating multi-threaded performance based on OpenMP applications. It uses a set of shared-memory, parallel-processing applications to measure the performance of the computing system’s processors, memory architecture, operating system and compiler. Two levels of workloads are available to characterize performance for either medium- or large-sized systems. Looking to the future In addition to announcing the price reductions, last night SPEC/HPG outlined development plans for SPEC MPI200X, an upcoming benchmark suite for measuring performance of systems running applications written under MPI (Message Passing Interface), the distributed computing API for cluster systems. No release date was given for the MPI-based benchmark. For more information and to order Additional information on SPEC/HPG and its benchmarks can be found at www.spec.org/hpg/. SPEC OMP2001 can be ordered immediately at the new price by visiting its Web site.