The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers[1]. 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. The Whetstone Compiler was built at the Atomic Power Division of the English Electric Company in Whetstone, Leicestershire, England[2], hence its name. 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). The Whetstone benchmark primarily measures the floating-point arithmetic performance. A similar benchmark for integer and string operations is the Dhrystone.
References
- ^ * H. J. Curnow and B. A. Wichman (February 1976). "A Synthetic Benchmark". Computer Journal 19 (1).
- ^ B. Randell and L.J. Russell, "Algol 60 Implementation", Academic Press, 1964
