The SERT Suite

The work on the SERT suite started around 2009 with the ground-breaking design of the Chauffeur framework, followed by the design and implementation of the workload, automated hardware and software discovery, and GUI. After a series of successful Alpha and Beta test phases, the SERT suite was released on February 26, 2013. On March 15, 2013, the United States Department of Energy's (DOE) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated the reporting of SERT results in their ENERGY STAR for Server Certification program. The collection of these data sets was the basis for formulation of thresholds for future energy programs.

The SPECpower Committee released four upgrades over the years to further enhance the usability of the SERT 1 Suite and to increase its platform support. The primary focus of the SERT 2 Suite was the reduction of its run time and improvements on the automated hardware and software discovery to reduce test time and cost. In addition, the support of additional power analyzers and interfaces was adopted in order to provide wider choices for users. Also, for more accurate characterization of memory, some major improvements of the memory subsystem worklets, were implemented. Simultaneously, the SPECpower Committee, in collaboration with the more academic-focused SPEC Power Research Group, conducted large-scale experiments in order to determine the server efficiency metric for the SERT 2 Suite which enabled its release on March 28, 2017.

A significant milestone was achieved on September 17, 2018 as the U.S. EPA released the final version of the ENERGY STAR Version 3.0 Computer Servers Program Requirements. It defines Active State Efficiency Thresholds based on the SERT 2.0.1 metric, replacing the idle power thresholds and will determine ENERGY STAR eligibility effective June 17, 2019.

March 15, 2019: The European Union adopts regulation utilizing the SERT suite's active and idle state efficiency metrics. The Official Journal of the European Union indicated that member states elected to adoptserver and data storage product Lot9 Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2019/424. This regulation went into effect March 1st, 2020, with the SERT 2 suite being the metric of choice for active and idle state server efficiency calculations on products within the scopeof this regulation.

March 29th, 2019: Japan METI Top Runner Program announces regulation utilizing the SERT suite. In a memo published March 29th, 2019, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) indicated they had accepted a shift in computer server energy conservation standard that takes into account the wholeserver rather than simply the CPU. The SERT suite version 2 is the metric chosen by METI to demonstrate performance per watt for computer servers in this geography.