The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is a highly recognized organization in the computer industry for its development of standardized benchmarks used to measure and compare different computer systems. Researchers and developers can download many of these benchmarks for free from the SPEC Web site, or read about new benchmarks that are soon to be released. A very large database of results is also available to the public, showing how both home and high performance scientific computer systems perform for various benchmarks. For the average user, a glossary of terms is provided.