Whetstone (program)
Whetstone (English for "whetstone") is a benchmark program to measure the speed and efficiency of computers in a comparable way.
As a result, the program delivers a number which indicates the “whetstone instructions per seconds”, ie the “Whetstone instructions per second ”. This unit of measurement is also called WIPS for short. In the meantime, however, calculations are made in GigaWIPS (GWIPS for short) (see also prefixes for units of measurement ).
history
The Whetstone benchmark was developed at the National Physical Laboratory in 1976 to determine the performance of a computer developed there. The program was originally written in Algol 60 , but the first C version was created in 1987 , and there are also versions in Fortran .
more details
The Whetstone benchmark uses floating point number operations for its measurements , but also integer arithmetic and accesses to field elements.