"Systems Benchmarking - For Scientists and Engineers", 2nd Edition

Friday, April 11, 2025 00:00

The second edition of a textbook on the topic of systems benchmarking written by SPEC RG Members was published by Springer.

The second edition of the book “Systems Benchmarking - For Scientists and Engineers” by Sam Kounev, Klaus-Dieter Lange, and Jóakim von Kistowski was just published by Springer. The first edition published in 2020 was received very well by the community and has now been established as both a textbook and a practical guide covering the state-of-the-art and future directions in the field of systems benchmarking. Together with the supplementary materials, the book is being adopted for teaching benchmarking in a growing number of graduate and postgraduate courses at universities around the world. It provides theoretical and practical foundations as well as an in-depth exploration of modern benchmarks and benchmark development.

Besides a number of updates in almost all chapters, for this new edition three chapters are added in Part II of the book: (1) “Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence” to cater the growing need to evaluate and benchmark ML and AI systems, (2) “Scalability of Networks and Systems” focusing on novel metrics and techniques to evaluate scalability, and (3) “PC, Workstation, Graphics, and Network Benchmarks” covering popular benchmarks like SYSmark, PCMark, Phoronix Test Suite, 3DMark, the Blender benchmark, and end-to-end network performance tools.

For more information about the new edition, including a foreword by Ian T. Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago), you can check the book web site at: https://www.benchmarking-book.com/

The authors would like to thank the following SPEC members who were involved as chapter co-authors in Part II (“Applications”) of the book: Jeremy Arnold (AMD), André Bauer (IIT Chicago), John Beckett (AMD), James Bucek (HP Inc.), Ken Cantrell (NetApp, Inc.), Don Capps (Netapp), Alexander Carlton (AMD), Simon Eismann (MongoDB), Sorin Faibish (DellEMC), Johannes Grohmann (Meta), Nikolas Herbst (Uni-Würzburg), Tobias Hossfeld (Uni-Würzburg), Rouven Krebs (SAP SE), Yannik Lubas (Uni-Würzburg), Mary Anne Marquez (IBM), Maximilian Meissner (Uni-Würzburg), Aleksandar Milenkoski (SentinelOne), David Morse (Broadcom), Nicholas A. Principe (iXsystems, Inc.), David Schmidt (Red Hat Inc.), Norbert Schmitt (IBM), Van Smith (AMD), Simon Spinner (IBM), Sitsofe Wheeler (Ocean Blue Software),and Marwin Züfle (Uni-Würzburg).