Dear NEST Users and Developers,

Today is an exciting day in the history of NEST: The NEST Simulator is now part of the SPEC CPU 2026 industry benchmark.

You can find the list of benchmarks here https://www.spec.org/cpu2026/docs/overview.html#Q13, where NEST is included with two cases (single and multithreaded).

SPECrate®2026 Floating Point: nest.767_r

SPECspeed®2026 Floating Point: nest.867_s

For more on SPEC CPU 2026, see

Madhav, M., Lee, A., Mejia, A., Moore, B., Soppadandi, C., Cambly, C., Müllner, C., Bowers, D., Reiner, D., Bakhvalov, D., Zhao, D., Voth, D., Xue, F., Silber-Chaussumier, F., Bucek, J., Southern, J., Liu, J., Himer, J., Henning, J., … Todorovski, Z. (2026).

SPEC CPU: The Next Generation (Version 1).

arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2605.01575 

The two-year process of getting NEST ready for SPEC CPU 2026 is documented in the now closed issue https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator/issues/3217.

I consider the inclusion of the NEST Simulator in the SPEC CPU 2026 industry benchmark a tremendous validation of over 30 years of focused work on quality research software engineering and would like to thank all who have contributed to NEST code for making this success possible. I'd also like to thank Mahesh Madhav from Ampere Computing for promoting NEST as a SPEC CPU test case and for the excellent collaboration in getting NEST ready for the benchmark.

All the best!

Hans Ekkehard