SPEC Advocacy to Clarify U.S. Position on Inclusive Approach to Global Technology Standards Development

The expansion of export controls via the “Entity List”

Through its Export Administration Regulations (EAR), the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), a division of the U.S. Commerce Department, imposed export controls via an “Entity List” that includes certain businesses, research institutions, government and private organizations, individuals, etc., that are subject to specific license requirements for the export or transfer of specified items.

A few years ago, to ensure the safe application of 5G technology, the U.S. government stipulated that U.S. agencies should not cooperate with companies on the BIS Entity List. This ban was never intended to restrict the development of global standards. However, due to the overly strict definition of the term "standard" in the original exemption clause of BIS, the SPEC SERT suite was classified as a restricted technology, which prevented SPEC (an international standards organization with 12 Chinese member companies) from continuing to develop standards with its members on the Entity List.

The unintended impact on SPEC

Although headquartered in the U.S., SPEC is an international organization with members and leadership from many countries around the world, including China.

Harmonized standards are the optimal way to promote consistent design and enable companies to meet regulatory requirements. They also eliminate significant costs for manufacturers that would otherwise need to meet additional benchmark requirements worldwide. Some governments even consider open standards critical to their country’s success and competitiveness. Restricting companies on the Entity List from participating in the development of energy efficiency benchmarks risks dividing the global standards process, undermining the primary goal of standardization.

However, the prohibitions associated with the Entity List and the SPEC SERT suite meant that SPEC could not continue its standards development work with member companies who had been added to the Entity List.

SPEC’s advocacy efforts

In 2020, there was a major positive development when BIS amended its EAR rules, citing that “it is important to U.S. technological leadership that U.S. companies be able to work in [standards] bodies in order to ensure that U.S. standards proposals are fully considered” and that “international standards serve as the building blocks for product development and help ensure functionality, interoperability, and safety of the products.”

While this was an important milestone, the language of this BIS amendment did not permit SPEC to invite its former members back into SPEC or to invite other organizations on the Entity List to join. In response, SPEC took a series of actions to advocate for the revision of relevant U.S. laws and to promote international technology exchanges and innovation.

SPEC created the International Standards Group (ISG), specifically designed to comply with the updated BIS requirements and provide a clear separation between SPEC’s international standards work and other SPEC projects. Also, SPEC, The Green Grid, the European Commission, and 16 other international organizations took the initiative to work with BIS and the Commerce Department for a solution.

As part of its effort, SPEC hired a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce (Export Administration), Department of Commerce, to educate and support the SPEC legal team. SPEC’s advocacy included an appeal to the Secretary of Commerce to clarify the Entity List carve-out for “standards-related activity” or “standards development activity,” where “standard” includes a “standardized benchmark” that is “measurement software developed by an organization of relevant industry companies, to evaluate the performance or energy consumption of a computing system.” This language would apply directly to the SPEC SERT suite.

SPEC successfully advocated changes to U.S. rules

SPEC’s advocacy finally yielded results when BIS amended its regulation based on our requests. Consequently, an organization listed on the U.S. BIS Entity List is no longer restricted from licensing, obtaining updates, or participating in the development of the SPEC SERT suite within the SPEC International Standards Group (ISG). These activities qualify for the updated U.S. BIS carve-out for standards-related activities if they are related to developing, revising, amending, issuing, reissuing, interpreting, implementing, promulgating, applying, or otherwise maintaining the ISO/IEC 21836:2020 standard. As a result, BIS-listed entities will now be able to obtain SPEC SERT licenses and updates as well as being involved in SPEC SERT standards development.

The return of excluded members is critical because it will enable SPEC to continue to promote effective global standardized benchmarks and apply them to government energy efficiency regulations. The successful adoption of SPEC SERT suites by government regulations, such as China National Institute of Standardization; EU Lot9 Ecodesign; Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; and the U.S. EPA Energy Star, is critical to SPEC's efforts to promote sustainable technology development around the world. For example, computer servers that are ENERGY STAR certified are, on average, about 38% more energy efficient than standard servers. This means that if all computer servers sold in the United States were ENERGY STAR certified, end users would save more than 4 billion USD per year.

SPEC SERT 3 suite under development

Through years of hard work, in collaboration with other international organizations, we are pleased to have successfully promoted changes to U.S. policies to remove the unintended restrictions on the development of international standardized benchmarks.

SPEC ISG invites the return of member companies excluded from collaborating due to policy reasons, bringing together the strength of industry, academia, and research from all over the world to cooperate on future computing energy efficiency standards.

The next-generation energy efficiency rating tool is currently under development by the SPEC ISG Server Committee, which includes representatives from AMD, Ampere, Dell, HPE, IBM, Intel, IEIT, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the University of Würzburg. The SPEC SERT 3 suite utilizes the SPECpower Committee's innovative modular architecture, allowing streamlined integration of the latest versions of the Chauffeur benchmark harness and the PTDaemon Interface, which are also utilized by benchmark organizations like the TPC and MLCommons. This modular design reduces the time required for developing future workloads (e.g., machine learning, security, distributed ledger), adding new architectures, and development environments (e.g. Python) and supporting new power analyzers and temperature sensors.

We welcome companies from around the world to join in the development of the next-generation SPEC SERT suite, enabling governments and businesses to more effectively achieve sustainable development and carbon emission reduction goals.

For further details on joining the standards-related activities at SPEC, please see https://www.spec.org/spec/docs/SPEC_Sustaining_Membership_Application.pdf.