The SPECpowerNext Benchmark Suite, its Implementation and New Workloads from a Developer's Perspective

Innovation needs a competitive and fair playing field on which products can be compared and informed choices can be made. Standard benchmarks are a necessity to create such a level playing field among competitors in the server market for more energy-efficient servers. That, in turn, motivates their engineers to design more energy-efficient hardware. The SPECpower_ssj 2008 benchmark drove the increase of server energy efficiency by 113 times for single CPU servers, or 19 times on average. Yet, with added functionality and load, they are expected to consume a rising amount of energy. Additionally, server usage in data centers has changed over time with new application types. To continue the effort of increasing server energy efficiency, a new version, SPECpowerNext, is under development. In this work, after a short introduction to SPECpower_ssj 2008, we present the new implementation of SPECpowerNext together with the standardized way to collect server information in heterogeneous data centers. We also give insight, including preliminary measurements, into two of SPECpowerNext new workloads, the Wiki and the APA workload, in addition to an overview of both workloads.