The Whetstone Benchmark

A comparison of the single processor Whetstone performance on a variety of machines, including vector supercomputers, minisupers, super-workstations and workstations, together with that obtained on a number of vector CPUs and on single nodes of various MPP machines is given in the following tables. Data provided includes the Mflop performance on a variety of floating point vector loops (V_L =1024), together with the total CPU time to execute the benchmark, and the MWips performance. The primary aim of this benchmark is to provide a performance measure of both floating point (FP) and integer arithmetic; thus while trends in the V_L Mflop ratings are of interest, only a small part of the total CPU time is actually involved in these operations. The wide variety of standard functions exercised (abs, sqrt, exp, alog, sin, cos, atan etc.) consume a far larger fraction of the reported times; note the latter provide a close mapping onto the measured rate of instruction processing (MWips, million whetstones instructions per second). Results from the older MATRIX-89 benchmark are no longer listed as the overall run times are so small on the current generation of hardware to be of little use. Note that the MATRIX-97 benchmark was generated from the MATRIX-89 code by increasing the outer loop variable, i2, by an order of magnitude.

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