The High Performance Group of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has recently released a benchmark suite based on a variety MPI applications from several different areas. The suite was developed over the last few years with the combined efforts of a number of member companies. Ported and tested on a variety of platforms, the suite comes with run rules and performance metrics to help ensure fair and objective benchmarking and comparison of high performance computing systems and software. The final suite comprises of 13 technical applications from different domains. These compute-intensive applications emphasize the performance of CPU, the memory, communication interconnect, compilers, file system, and MPI. The talk will describe, in detail, the benchmark creation process, starting with selection of candidate applications, the performance characteristics of the final set of applications, and an interpretation of the results. A roadmap of future additions to the suite will be presented.