The 2025 SPEC Impact Award Winners

Sneha Gohad was instrumental in bringing a proprietary ISV-based workload into the SPECworkstation 4.0 benchmark, adding significant value for the benchmark and users. This important architecture, engineering and construction, workload will appeal to a large base of workstation users, further enhancing the benchmark’s prestige. Sneha’s efforts were key in working with the ISV for licensing and approval, coding the workload into the benchmark, testing and characterization of the release, and collaborating to remove process affinity to make the performance measurements more realistic for hybrid workstation workloads.

Rizu Jain was one of the key contributors responsible for the SPECviewperf 15 benchmark. She has been working on the benchmark for 2.5 years, and, as the release manager, was responsible for managing all the builds, process improvements, and tracking issues in GitHub. Rizu completely overhauled the benchmark framework, updating the SPECviewperf-specific GUI to an updated UI architecture used by other GWPG benchmarks. She took traces of two viewsets, Creo and Maya, and converted them into the Viewperf format.

SPECjbb2015 is one of the most published Java benchmarks and is very complex with a large code base and many deployment categories. Customers noticed a significant number of run-time crashes with v1.03, which the Java committee attributed to a specific phase during the benchmark execution. Roshan Mangal undertook the task of debugging the root cause, spending weeks identifying and replicating the problem. He then proposed and tested a performance-neutral solution, which became the primary update in v1.

Anthony Mansur, who became SPECgpc Vice Chair in February 2024, played an important role during the SPECviewperf 15 benchmark development. He developed the Enscape viewset, leveraging the new Vulkan API, which offers new features, such as GPU accelerated ray tracing, which brings a new level of visual fidelity and complexity to the SPECviewperf benchmark. Additionally, he adapted the open-source Unreal engine into SPECviewperf, exposing the new DirectX 12 API for the visual simulation segment, a key highlight of the new SPECviewperf 15 benchmark.

Nikola Petrov led the development for SPEC’s new Siemens NX APC benchmark, SPECapc for SNX 2024. He demonstrated drive and leadership throughout the project, managing the design work, most of the testing and bug fixes, and addressing committee inquiries. As this was a ground-up development, Nikola had no previous benchmark to base his work on, so he adapted available models to create a good APC benchmark. His effort was particularly impressive given that this was his first project with SPEC, so he had to quickly learn the committee’s processes and standards while driving the benchmark development to completion.

As SPECwpc Chair since 2023, Chandra Sakthivel successfully guided the seven-year SPECworkstation 4.0 benchmark effort to its official release in December 2024. Despite the longest development cycle in GWPG history, he maintained member motivation and secured additional expertise from Intel to complete the benchmark. During this time, Chandra coordinated seven alpha, seven beta and four release candidates, navigating a complex development process with numerous release issues and blockers. He also proposed adding the AI/ML vertical, significantly benefiting data scientists and software developers.

As a technical lead for the SPEC Cloud v1 project, Przemyslaw Tyrkiel has helped guide the Cloud Committee through complex technical challenges, ensuring the successful execution of project goals. He designed the architecture for the Ansible test harness using an innovative approach which resulted in a benchmark implementation that is both easy to set up and user-friendly, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the testing process. Presemslaw also made substantial contributions to benchmark components other companies added.