The Whetstone benchmark is a benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was first written in Algol 60 in 1972 at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom and derived from statistics on program behaviour gathered on the KDF9 computer, using a modified version of its Whetstone Algol 60 compiler. The program's behavior replicated that of a typical KDF9 scientific program and was designed to defeat compiler optimizations that would have adversely affected the accuracy of this model. In computing, a benchmark is the result of running a computer program, or a set of programs, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, by running a number of standard tests and trials against it. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language) is a programming language originally developed in the mid 1950s which became the de facto standard way to report algorithms in print for almost the next 30 years. ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year that started on a Saturday. ... The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the national measurement standards laboratory for the United Kingdom, based at Bushy Park in Teddington, near London. ... KDF9 was an early British computer designed and built by English Electric, later English Electric Leo Marconi, EELM, later still incorporated into ICL. It came into service ca. ...

The Whetstone benchmark originally measured computing power in units of kilo-Whetstone Instructions per seconds (kWIPS). Results for a variety of languages, compilers and system architectures have been obtained and modern workstations typically achieve more than 1 000 000 kWIPS (1 Giga-WIPS). Giga (symbol: G) is a prefix in the SI system of units denoting 109, or 1 000 000 000. ...

The Whetstone benchmark primarily measures the floating-point arithmetic performance. A similar benchmark for integer and string operations is the Dhrystone. A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ... Dhrystone is a benchmark invented in 1984 by Reinhold P. Weicker. ...

External links

• CCLRC: The Whetstone Benchmark

References

• H. J. Curnow and B. A. Wichman, A Synthetic Benchmark, Computer Journal, Vol. 19 #1, February 1976