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].