Is Rust faster than Fortran and C++? A case study with scientific applications.
Hi everyone! 👋
Over the past year, I’ve been working on something interesting: We’ve ported the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) to Rust.
If you're not familiar with NPB, it's a widely used benchmark suite originally developed in Fortran by NASA’s Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Program, to compare languages and frameworks for parallelism.
The NPB-Rust allow us to compare Rust's performance against languages like Fortran and C++ using complex scientific applications derived from physics and computational fluid dynamics as benchmarks.
The results show that Rust’s sequential version is 1.23% slower than Fortran and 5.59% faster than C++, while Rust with Rayon was slower than both Fortran and C++ with OpenMP.
If you're interested in checking out more of our results, the following links lead to the pre-print paper and the GitHub repository, respectively (The image used in this post is taken from our pre-print paper):
🧠 NPB-Rust pre-print paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15536
🔗 NPB-Rust GitHub: https://github.com/GMAP/NPB-Rust
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I'm a member of GMAP (Parallel Application Modeling Group) at PUCRS (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Su), where we focus on research related to high-performance computing. The NPB-Rust project is still in progress.
