Whetstones

Whetstone is a benchmark test which attempts to measure the speed and efficiency at which a computer performs floating-point operations. The result of the test is given in units called kilo-whetstones-per-second or KWIPS.

The Whetstone is a synthetic benchmark designed to measure the behavior of scientific programs. It contains several modules that are meant to represent a mix of operations typically performed in scientific applications. A wide variety of C functions including sin, cos, sqrt, exp, and log are used as well as integer and floating-point math operations, array accesses, conditional branches, and procedure calls. The primary aim of this benchmark is to measure the performance of both integer and floating-point arithmetic.