High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) are a set of benchmarks targeting performance evaluation of highly parallel supercomputers. They are developed and maintained by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division (formerly the NASA Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Program) based at the NASA Ames Research Center. NAS solicits performance results for NPB from all sources. Traditional benchmarks that existed before NPB, such as the Livermore loops, the LINPACK Benchmark and the NAS Kernel Benchmark Program, were usually specialized for vector computers. They generally suffered from inadequacies including parallelism-impeding tuning restrictions and insufficient problem sizes, which rendered them inappropriate for highly parallel systems.