The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...

s. It was first written in

Algol 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a ...

in 1972 at the Technical Support Unit of the Department of Trade and Industry (later part of the

Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) was a UK government agency providing computer and telecoms support to government departments. History Formation In 1957, the UK government formed the Technical Support Unit (TSU) o ...

) in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

. It was derived from statistics on program behaviour gathered on the

KDF9 KDF9 was an early British 48-bit computer designed and built by English Electric (which in 1968 was merged into International Computers Limited (ICL)). The first machine came into service in 1964 and the last of 29 machines was decommissioned i ...

computer at NPL National Physical Laboratory, using a modified version of its Whetstone

ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a ...

compiler. The workload on the machine was represented as a set of frequencies of execution of the 124 instructions of the Whetstone Code. The Whetstone Compiler was built at the Atomic Power Division of the

English Electric N.º UIC: 9094 110 1449-3 (Takargo Rail) The English Electric Company Limited (EE) was a British industrial manufacturer formed after the Armistice of 11 November 1918, armistice of World War I by amalgamating five businesses which, during th ...

Company in

Whetstone, Leicestershire Whetstone is a village and civil parish in the Blaby district of Leicestershire, England and largely acts as a commuter village for Leicester, five miles to the north. The population at the 2011 census was 6,556. It is part of the Leicester ...

, England, hence its name. Dr. B.A. Wichman at NPL produced a set of 42 simple ALGOL 60 statements, which in a suitable combination matched the execution statistics. To make a more practical benchmark Harold Curnow of TSU wrote a program incorporating the 42 statements. This program worked in its ALGOL 60 version, but when translated into FORTRAN it was not executed correctly by the IBM optimizing compiler. Calculations whose results were not output were omitted. He then produced a set of program fragments which were more like real code and which collectively matched the original 124 Whetstone instructions. Timing this program gave a measure of the machine’s speed in thousands of Whetstone instructions per second (). The Fortran version became the first general purpose benchmark that set industry standards of computer system performance. Further development was carried out by Roy Longbottom, also of TSU/CCTA, who became the official design authority. The Algol 60 program ran under the Whetstone compiler in July 2010, for the first time since the last KDF9 was shut down in 1980, but now executed by a KDF9 emulator. Following increased computer speeds, performance measurement was changed to Millions of Whetstone Instructions Per Second (MWIPS). Source code and pre-compiled versions for PCs in C/ C++,

Basic BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic ( ...

, Fortran and

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

are available. The Whetstone benchmark primarily measures the

floating-point arithmetic In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

performance. A similar benchmark for

integer An integer is the number zero (), a positive natural number (, , , etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign ( −1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the languag ...

and string operations is the

Dhrystone Dhrystone is a synthetic computing benchmark program developed in 1984 by Reinhold P. Weicker intended to be representative of system ( integer) programming. The Dhrystone grew to become representative of general processor ( CPU) performance. ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

Benchmark Programs and Reports
(see also

Netlib Netlib is a repository of software for scientific computing maintained by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Netlib comprises many separate programs and libraries. Most of the code is written in ...

)
Whetstone Algol Revisited, or Confessions of a compiler writer PDF file
(B. Randell, 1964) Benchmarks (computing) Blaby Computer-related introductions in 1972 History of computing in the United Kingdom Science and technology in Leicestershire

See also

References

External links