HP publishes first TPC-Energy results

Today the Transaction Processing Council announced that HP submitted the first published results for the new TPC-Energy benchmark, a set of measures that augment the existing TPC-C, TPC-E and TPC-H benchmarks (we talked about TPC-Energy here).

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced the first results for its TPC-Energy specification. Hewlett-Packard Company has published TPC-Energy results on all three TPC benchmarks: TPC-E, which simulates the online transaction processing (OLTP) workload of a brokerage firm; TPC-C, which simulates the OLTP order-entry workload; and TPC-H, which simulates a decision support workload. Each of these benchmark publications also includes the optional Watts per performance metrics.

The TPC isn’t the only bear in the energy benchmark woods, though; the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has been working with the EPA to develop its own test for servers that will be part of the next iteration of the Energy Star for servers program, and The Green Grid has been looking at energy use in the datacenter as a whole for a couple years now as well.

According to coverage in the EE Times, HP’s efforts provided key feedback that will be used in the 1.2 rev of the TPC-Energy measurements.

“It took us seven days to audit four results, and those were very long days,” said Mike Nikolaiev, chairman of the TPC-Energy committee and manager of an x86 server performance group at HP.

HP’s work helped clarify aspects of the spec and the TPC’s software testing package for it. The group expects to post on its Web site soon the resulting version 1.2 of the energy spec and an upgraded version of the software tool.

As we’ve pointed out before, though, these are definitely not technically-oriented computing measurements. Still, understanding the approach may be useful to those looking for ways to extend our benchmarks to include an energy dimension.