SPECworkstation^® 3.1

The SPECworkstation^® 3.1 benchmark, released on March 17, 2021, measures all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications

The benchmark includes more than 30 workloads containing nearly 140 tests that exercise CPU, graphics, I/O and memory bandwidth. The updates in version 3.1 offer significant improvements in how workloads partition and distribute threads across multi-core CPUs, expand support for next generation GPUs, and add features such as vectorization that leverage advanced CPU hardware to accelerate performance.

Key updates in the SPECworkstation 3.1 benchmark include:

Improved thread partitioning and distribution for high thread count machines
Improved support for latest generation GPUs
Improved vector instruction support for CPUs
Reduced free disk space requirement for storage test to 100GB

The SPECworkstation 3.1 benchmark runs under Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit. Windows 11 is not supported by SPECworkstation at this time. Results from version 3.1 are not comparable to those from previous versions of the SPECworkstation benchmark, including SPECworkstation v3.0.x versions.

SPECworkstation 3.1 Workloads

Media and Entertainment

Blender

This workload uses the open-source Blender (blender.org) application to measure the performance of content-creation workflows. It contains the following tests:

3BMWs: This is a scene with ~470K vertices and ~900K triangles. The scene includes three identical car models. It is rendered with the OpenGL renderer as the camera pans through 360 degrees.
BMW1M: This is a scene with ~91K vertices and ~172K triangles. It uses a single car model. A single frame is rendered with the Blender Cycles ray-tracing renderer.
Island: This is a scene with ~16K vertices and 32K triangles. It includes a particle system to represent a large quantity of birds.
BWM27: This scene depicts two cars rendered with the Blender Cycles ray-tracing renderer. It contains 99K vertices and 187K triangles.
Classroom: An interior scene with lots of light sources and bounced lights, including dust particles suspended in the air and light passing through a window and emanating from a lamp.

Handbrake

This workload is based on the open-source media encoder handbrake (www.handbrake.fr). It takes a 4K mp4 file and transcodes it with an H.265 encoder at two different resolutions. The first transcoding down-samples the file from 4K to 2K. The second trans coding goes from H264 4K to H265 4K.

LuxRender

LuxRender uses LuxMark, a benchmark based on the new LuxCore physically based renderer, to render a chrome sphere resting on a grid of numbers in a beach scene.

Maya

This is the maya-05 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Maya 2017 application from Autodesk.

3ds Max

This is the 3dsmax-06 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by 3ds Max 2016 using the default Nitrous DX11 driver.

Product Development

Rodinia (CFD)

Rodinia is a benchmark suite developed by Professor Kevin Skadron, et al, at the University of Virginia, to benchmark heterogeneous platforms. The CFD solver is an unstructured-grid, finite-volume solver for 3D Euler equations representing compressible flow.

WPCcfd

This workload is based on the OpenFOAM open-source CFD solver. The OpenFOAM combustion solver XiFoam is used to solve compressible premixed/partially-premixed combustion with turbulence modeling.

CalculiX

This workload is based on the open-source finite element program Calculix (www.calculix.de). It models the internal temperature of a jet engine turbine.

CATIA

This is the catia-05 viewset from SPECviewperf 13 for testing graphics performance. It was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the CATIA V6 R2012 application from Dassault Systémes. Model sizes range from 5.1 to 21 million vertices.

Creo

This is the creo-02 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Creo 3 and Creo 4 applications from PTC. Model sizes range from 20 to 48 million vertices.

NX

This is the snx-03 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the NX 8.0 application from Siemens PLM. Model sizes range from 7.15 to 8.45 million vertices.

Solidworks

This is the sw-04 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It was created from traces of Dassault Systémes’ SolidWorks 2013 SP1 application. Models used in the viewset range in size from 2.1 to 21 million vertices.

Showcase

This is the showcase-02 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It was created from traces of Autodesk’s Showcase 2013 application. The model used in the viewset contains 8 million vertices.

Life Sciences

LAMMPS

LAMMPS is a molecular dynamics simulator developed at Sandia National Labs (http://lammps.sandia.gov/bench.html). The workload consists of five tests that simulate a variety of molecular properties. LAMMPS is run in parallel using MPI in the SPECworkstation benchmark.

NAMD

NAMD is a scalable molecular dynamics simulator developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/). The workload consists of three tests that simulate a variety of molecular interactions.

Rodinia (heartwall, lavamd, hotspot, srad)

Rodinia is a benchmark suite developed by Professor Kevin Skadron, et al, at the University of Virginia, to benchmark heterogeneous platforms. It contains the following tests:

Heartwall: A medical imaging process used to track movements of a set of sample points in the image of a beating heart.
Lavamd: The code calculates particle potential and relocation due to mutual forces between particles within a large 3D space.
Hotspot: A thermal simulation tool to estimate processor temperature.
SRAD: Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion, an algorithm to remove speckles in an image without sacrificing features.
Medical

This is the medical-02 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It uses the Tuvok rendering core of the ImageVis3D (http://www.sci.utah.edu/software/imagevis3d.html) volume visualization program to render a 2D projection of a 3D volumetric grid. A typical 3D grid in this viewset is a group of 3D slices acquired by a scanner (such as CT or MRI).

Financial Services

This section uses three popular algorithms from the financial services industry.

Monte Carlo simulation, or probability simulation, is a technique used to understand the impact of risk and uncertainty in financial, project management, cost, and other forecasting models.
Black-Scholes is a pricing model used to determine the fair price or theoretical value for a call or a put option based on variables such as volatility, type of option, underlying stock price, time, strike price, and risk-free rate.
Binomial options pricing model is a generalized numerical method for valuation of options. It uses a latticed-based model of the varying price over time of the underlying financial instrument.

Energy (oil and gas)

FFTW

This workload computes the discrete Fourier transform for 1D, 2D and 3D transforms. The 1D transform uses a 16MB vector, the 2D transform uses a 4Kx4K matrix, and the 3D transform uses a 256x256x256 matrix.

Convolution

This workload computes a convolution with a random filter of 100×100 pixels on an image that is 20,000×20,000 pixels.

SRMP

This workload addresses seismic data processing. It implements a Surface-Related Multiples Prediction (SRMP) algorithm written by Evgeny Kurin of GEOLAB Ltd. to remove multiples from seismic data.

Kirchhoff Migration

This workload uses a Kirchhoff equation form of the wave equation to calculate the back propagation of the seismic wavefield.

Poisson

This workload solves the Poisson equation using OpenMP for parallel execution.

Energy

This is the energy-02 viewset from the SPECviewperf 13 graphics performance benchmark. It is based on rendering techniques used by the open-source OpendTect seismic visualization application.

General Operations

This section benchmarks several applications that are in widespread use in the workstation market.

7zip

The freeware 7zip program offers good scaling performance between processors to compress and extract a hierarchy of files.

Python

This workload uses Python 3.6 to benchmark a variety of math operations, including those using the numpy and scipy math libraries, and the make charts and multithreaded matrix functionalities.

Octave

This workload uses Octave, a programming language for scientific computing, to compute a variety of math operations.

Storage

The storage workload is based on storage transaction traces from a wide variety of professional applications engaged in real work. These are grouped according to market segments for scoring purposes.

GPU Compute

LuxRender

LuxRender uses LuxMark, a benchmark based on the new LuxCore physically based renderer, to render a chrome sphere resting on a grid of numbers in a beach scene.

Caffe

Caffe is a deep-learning framework developed by Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) and by community contributors. Yangqing Jia created the project during his PhD studies at UC Berkeley.

Folding@Home

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics.

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Benchmark Rules

The system under test must correctly perform all of the operations being requested by the application during the benchmark.
No changes to any files associated with the benchmark are permitted excepted as noted in the benchmark run rules (section 4 of this document).
The entire display raster must be available for use by the application being benchmarked, and the display must be powered on.
It is not permissible to override the intended behavior of the tests through any means including, but not limited to, registry settings or environment variables.
No interaction is allowed with the system under test during the benchmark, unless required by the benchmark. It is not permissible to interact with the system under test to influence the progress of the benchmark during execution.
The system under test cannot skip steps during the benchmark run.
It is not permissible to change the system configuration during the running of a given benchmark. That is, one can’t power off the system, make some changes, then power back on and run the rest of the benchmark.
Results submitted must be obtained using the scripts, models, and application revisions which are specified for that submission cycle by the SPECwpc committee.
Optimizations for viewsets used in this benchmark must adhere to the same standards as outlined in the SPECgpc® (Graphics Performance Characterization) Committee Rules, Version 2.13, Section 3.
Optimizations for the workloads used in this benchmark cannot modify the executable or the dataset used in the test.
The number of threads spawned for multi-threaded workloads may be modified for a given benchmark run by changing the values in the advanced tab of the GUI. The test harness will calculate the number of threads that are evenly divisible by the number of logical cores in the system and adjust the actual number of threads spawned by each process.
Caching of files in a high-performance storage device is allowed as long as the mechanism for populating the cache is generally applicable to a wide range of applications run on the device under test.
SPECworkstation is only supported on systems running Microsoft Windows 10 64bit.
The color depth used must be at least 24 bits (true color), with at least 8 bits of red, 8 bits of green and 8 bits of blue.
If a depth buffer is requested, it must have at least 24 bits of resolution.
The display raster resolution must be at least 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels and must fully display all of the benchmark tests being submitted. Higher desktop resolutions may be used, and while the operating system may create the appearance of a higher raster resolution, the actual raster resolution remains at 1900 x 1060 and will be noted in the results file and log files. An optional feature to adjust the raster resolution to the native resolution of the display (less a ten-pixel border) may be selected, but not all viewsets will support this method of scaling. Therefore, native resolution runs shall not be accepted for publication or otherwise be considered official until such a point that all viewsets can be scaled to higher native display resolutions.
Screen resolution must be large enough to run the individual tests at their requested window size, with no reduction or clipping of test window.
Screen DPI scaling must be set to 100% on Microsoft Windows, and no UI or other window elements, including the task bar, may occlude the viewport rendering context.
The benchmark must be run with Windows User Account Control (UAC) and firewall disabled, or with administrator privileges and the appropriate firewall settings to allow the benchmark to complete without interruption.
The benchmark can be installed and run on any storage device connected to the system. 190GB of free space is required after the benchmark is installed to run the storage portion of the benchmark.
The system under test must have at least 16GB of system RAM.
The scoring utility must be used to generate valid results.
Virtualized configurations, defined as any operating system configuration running on a Hyper Visor or virtualization layer of any kind, must include the word “virtualized” in the comment field of the config.txt file. This information must be populated before the execution of the benchmark to ensure the results reflect this attribute.
Virtualized configurations as defined in rule 18 must also include a declaration of the transport layer name and version used by the virtualization software in parenthesis after the graphics accelerator listed in the Graphics Accelerator field of the Graphics Hardware Configuration section of the result file.
Virtualized configurations as defined above must manually modify the Model field on the submission form to include a three line link on the summary page that includes:
– Physical server supplier and model number
– Hypervisor supplier and version
– VDI supplier and version

Running the benchmark

More than 30 workloads containing nearly 140 tests in the SPECworkstation 3.1 benchmark exercise CPU, graphics, I/O and memory bandwidth. The workloads are divided by application categories that include media and entertainment (3D animation, rendering), product development (CAD/CAM/CAE), life sciences (medical, molecular), financial services, energy (oil and gas), general operations, and GPU compute.

Scoring

Individual scores are generated for each test and a composite score for each category is calculated based on a reference machine, yielding a “bigger is better” result. The reference machine is a Z240 tower with the following configuration:

Processor: Intel E3-1240 v5 @3.5GHz
Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro WX3100
Memory: 16GB, DDR3 2133MHz
Storage: SanDisk 512GB SSD
OS: MS Windows 10 build 17134

Have a question regarding a SPEC GWPG benchmark? We are here to help! We can provide technical assistance with benchmark related issues. We are unable to assist with hardware installation issues, hardware problems, non-SPEC software installation issues, non-SPEC software problems, hardware or software specific tuning.

For benchmark specific questions, please include benchmark name, benchmark version, and full system configuration details.

SPECworkstation® 3.1

SPECworkstation 3.1 Workloads

Media and Entertainment

Blender

Handbrake

LuxRender

Maya

3ds Max

Product Development

Rodinia (CFD)

WPCcfd

CalculiX

CATIA

Creo

NX

Solidworks

Showcase

Life Sciences

LAMMPS

NAMD

Rodinia (heartwall, lavamd, hotspot, srad)

Financial Services

Energy (oil and gas)

FFTW

Convolution

SRMP

Kirchhoff Migration

Poisson

Energy

General Operations

7zip

Python

Octave

Storage

GPU Compute

LuxRender

Caffe

Folding@Home

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SPECworkstation^® 3.1