A Standard C Port of the NAS Kernels Benchmark Program

FORTRAN is widely viewed as the programming language of choice for scientific and numerical computations. However, limitations of the language lead some to argue that it should be replaced by another language which better lends itself to the production of structured and maintainable code. We provide quantitative data relevant to this argument by reporting on a port of the NAS Kernels benchmark program from FORTRAN 77 to ANSI/ISO Standard C. Single-processor performance results for the CRAY Y-MP, CRAY-2, Convex 3240 and SGI 4D/25 are reported for C and FORTRAN versions of the code. Strengths and weaknesses of C vis a vis FORTRAN are evaluated. While the structured programming features of C are quite desirable, FORTRAN arrays provide the programmer with much more flexibility and aid the compiler in producing optimized code. 1 Computer Sciences Corporation, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000