NVIDIA Violates the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s Fair Use Policy



Today the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) announced that NVIDIA has violated the TPC’s Fair Use Policy. In the paper "State of RAPDIS: Bridging the GPU Data Science Ecosystem," presented at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2020, and in associated company blogs and marketing materials, NVIDIA claims that it has “outperformed by nearly 20x the record for running the standard big data analytics benchmark, known as TPCx-BB.” Since NVIDIA has not published official TPC results, and instead compared results from derived workloads to official TPC results, the comparisons are invalid.



"The TPC actively encourages publicizing of TPC results by all organizations, including the press, market researchers, financial analysts and non-profit organizations,“ said Mike Brey, chairman of the TPC Steering Committee. "However, to ensure that users and readers of TPC results are given a fair and complete representation of TPC data, the TPC requests that all users follow the Fair Use rules, outlined in TPC policies, when publishing or publicizing results.”

The TPC is working with NVIDIA to resolve the issue and make all relevant corrections.



About the TPC



The TPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. The TPC currently has 20 full members: Actian, Alibaba, AMD, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP Enterprise, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nutanix, Oracle, Red Hat, Transwarp, TTA and VMware; and 4 associate members: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), Gartner, Imec, and the University of Coimbra. Further information is available at http://www.tpc.org.