nas


nas, a Fortran90 code which is a NASA kernel benchmark program, by David Bailey.

The benchmark program was developed around 1984, and measured computational performance on a representative range of realistic calculations. One motivation for this benchmark was to move beyond the LINPACK benchmark, which focussed on a single highly structured procedure.

Benchmarking computers has become much more difficult now that memory, I/O, multicores and distributed memory have all become significant factors in computing performance. Nonetheless, the NAS benchmarks provide an interesting insight into the floating point processing power of a system, and so, for this reason, a version of the program has been created that retains the functionality of the original, while being somewhat easier to transfer to other languages.

Usage:

nas
runs the program, and prints the error, timing, and MegaFLOPS results.

Licensing:

The information on this web page is distributed under the MIT license.

Languages:

nas is available in a C version and a C++ version and a Fortran90 version and a MATLAB version and an Octave version and a Python version.

Related Data and Programs:

nas_test

linpack_bench, a Fortran90 code which measures the time taken by linpack() to solve a particular linear system.

Reference:

  1. David Bailey, John Barton,
    The NAS Kernel Benchmark Program,
    Numerical Aerodynamics Simulations Systems Division,
    NASA Ames Research Center,
    13 June 1986.

Source Code:


Last revised on 01 August 2020.