The Stanard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is a non-profit organization that aims to produce "fair, impartial and meaningful benchmarks for computers." SPEC was founded in 1988 and their goal is to ensure that the marketplace has a fair and useful set of metrics to differentiate candidate systems. Its member organizations includes leading computer and software manufacturers. SPEC benchmarks are widely used today in evaluating the performance of computer systems; the results are published on the SPEC web site. Results are informally referred to as "SPECmarks", results or even just "SPEC".