whetstone (redirected from Whetstones)

whetstone, natural or manufactured stone used as an abrasive solid to sharpen tools. It is used dry, with water, or with oil. Such a stone of the finer grade used with oil is usually called an oilstone.

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Whetstone

A benchmark program that tests both floating point and integer operations of a CPU. The Whetstone test uses a wide variety of C functions and common programming logic. Results are expressed in KWIPS (kilo Whetstones per second) and MWIPS (mega Whetstones per second). Whetstone I tests 32-bit, and Whetstone II tests 64-bit operations. See Dhrystone and benchmark.

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whetstone

1. a stone used for sharpening edged tools, knives, etc.

2. something that sharpens

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whetstone [‚wet‚stōn]

(materials)

Any hard, fine-grained, naturally occurring, usually siliceous rock suitable for sharpening cutting instruments.

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(benchmark)

Whetstone - The first major synthetic benchmark program, intended to be representative for numerical (floating-point intensive) programming. It is based on statistics gathered by Brian Wichmann at the National Physical Laboratory in England, using an Algol 60 compiler which translated Algol into instructions for the imaginary Whetstone machine. The compilation system was named after the small town of Whetstone outside the City of Leicester, England, where it was designed. The later dhrystone benchmark was a pun on Whetstone. Source code: C, single precision Fortran, double precision Fortran. ["A Synthetic Benchmark", H.J. Curnow and B.A. Wichmann, The Computer Journal, 19,1 (1976), pp. 43-49].