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The Greening of IT
110 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmark
information has been used for years to compare servers from a power aspect.
In the author’s experience, companies are very interested in SPEC marks
when comparing new servers. Customers use the SPEC marks to compare rel-
ative power. Here’s the SPEC home page: http://www.spec.org/.
In 2008, SPEC started a benchmark to compare the power consumed by a
server with its performance—a metric designed to aid users in boosting data
center efficiency. Following is information on SPEC and the server energy-
efficiency metrics being developed by SPEC.

SPEC

SPEC is a nonprofit corporation formed to establish, maintain, and
endorse a standardized set of relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the
newest generation of high-performance computers. SPEC develops bench-
mark suites and also reviews and publishes submitted results from member
organizations and other benchmark licensees.
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SPEC Metrics for Virtual Servers

SPEC formed a new subcommittee to develop standard methods of com-
paring virtualization performance for data center servers. The group investi-
gates the use of heterogeneous workloads that are spread across multiple
virtual machines on a single server, and the methods and metrics used by the
benchmark will be defined as part of the working group’s efforts.

SPEC Server Power and Performance Examples

SPECpower_ssj2008 is the first industry-standard SPEC benchmark that
evaluates the power and performance characteristics of volume server class
computers. The initial benchmark addresses the performance of server-side
Java™, and additional workloads are planned. Figures 7.1 through 7.4 show
power measurement results for four different servers.
One of the significant aspects of looking at server electric power consumed
versus server processing power produced is the server power used when the
server is idle (that is, doing nothing). A typical server uses 40 percent to 50
percent (or more) of its maximum power consumption when it is doing noth-
ing. The SPEC power and performance examples given here for a variety of