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The 2021 SPECtacular Award Winners

The SPECtacular Award is given to individuals who have significantly exceeded expectations in their contributions to SPEC.

Outstanding Service
Allen Jensen, SPECapc®

Allen Jensen

Keeping up with the rapid pace of application development requires timely updates to benchmarks. Soon after the release of the SPECapc for SOLIDWORKS 2019 benchmark in October 2019, Allen Jensen started porting the improvements to the next version to take advantage of a new graphics pipeline in SPECapc for SOLIDWORKS 2020. Throughout 2020, he maintained a build schedule for committee members and enhanced SPEC's relationship with a key customer, obtaining additional beta testing, which improved the quality of the benchmark. When SPECapc for SOLIDWORKS 2020 was released in October 2020, Allen went right to work on SOLIDWORKS 2021, released in March 2021.


Outstanding Service
Richard Caneca, SPEC CPU®

Richard Caneca

Result review is heroic and tedious work that contributes directly to SPEC's reputation for levelling the playing field and enabling robust, high-quality and trusted comparisons of computer hardware and software. Between January 2014 and April 2020, Richard Caneca, an active participant and contributor to the technical review of results submitted to the SPEC CPU Committee, was the technical reviewer on 138 occasions for a total of 10,475 submissions, contributed by 16 different companies. Richard's work is especially impressive in that for many years now, he has diligently completed this work strictly as a volunteer after his employer stopped participating in SPEC.


Outstanding Leadership
Mat Colgrove, SPEC® Vice President of Operations

Mat Colgrove

As the SPEC VP of Operations, Mat Colgrove is critical to SPEC's success. Despite not being directly involved with SPEC operations in the past and only stepping into the position in January of 2020, he has truly shined in this role, managing and supporting SPEC's staff, including hosting staff meetings, writing performance reviews, and collaborating with SPEC's third-party human resources (HR) firm. He quickly learned how SPEC staff and the HR firm interact, and he has generously made himself available to assist SPEC staff, help them drive projects forward, propose improvements, and take care of the people that take care of SPEC.


Technical Leadership
Anshu Arya, SPECwpc®

Anshu Arya

Anshu Arya has had a very positive impact on the SPECworkstation benchmark since the very first day he began working on the SPECwpc Committee in the fall of 2018. He has championed updating a large number of the CPU workloads to appropriately test modern multi-core CPUs, which has significantly improved SPECworkstation by keeping it relevant for the latest industry advances. In one instance, Anshu suggested, researched, and implemented a new patch to better measure performance of CPUs with more than 64 threads. This work was so impactful that it was recently highlighted in an article published by TechGage.


Technical Leadership
David Reiner, ISO / SERT®

David Reiner

The adoption of the SPEC Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT) in the ISO/IEC 21826 standard in November 2020 was a vital step in SPEC's strategy to secure global regulatory adoption of the SERT suite. David Reiner's work as SPEC's liaison to ISO directly shaped the final version of this standard, and he led the way in establishing and nurturing the relationship between the ISO, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the SPECpower Committee. In his role as President of SPEC, David also demonstrated initiative, leadership and dedication in dealing with the complex regulatory environment in the U.S. to help overcome hurdles to the adoption of SERT in Asia.