Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Scientific Linux 7.0 Trial Benchmarks With A Haswell-EP

With the new 20-thread Intel Xeon Haswell-EP processor I ran some basic benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 14.10 against the Red Hat Enterprise Linux derived Scientific 7.0.

While a proper, large Linux distribution comparison is coming shortly using the Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 ten-core processor plus Hyper Threading that was supplied by MSI for more Linux benchmarking, some new benchmark results to get this week kicked off are just comparing Scientific 7.0 to Ubuntu Linux 14.10. The Xeon E5-2687W v3 was runn ing with the MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard, 16GB of DDR4 system memory, 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and Radeon HD 5770 graphics.

Ubuntu 14.10 ships with the Linux 3.16 kernel, Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16, xf86-video-ati 7.4, Mesa 10.3, GCC 4.9.1, and an EXT4 file-system by default. The RHEL7-based Scientific 7.0 ships with the Linux 3.10 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.8.4, X.Org Server 1.15, xf86-video-ati 7.2.99, Mesa 9.2.5, GCC 4.8.2, and uses the XFS file-system by default.
As shown by the Phoronix Test Suite generated system table, there's a difference to point out in the I/O scheduler. Ubuntu 14.10 defaulted to deadline while Scientific Linux 7.0 defaulted to CFQ. Both distributions were opting for the Intel P-State CPU scaling driver with the powersave governor for this Haswell-EP Xeon processor. All other software packages/settings were at their defaults for each OS to maintain a level of comparability and reproducibility.

To see all of these preview benchmarks between Ubuntu 14.10 and Scientific 7.0, head on over to OpenBenchmarking.org. For the most part the performance is close and in some tests the results are a toss up while in some tests one OS is dominant over the other. Again, stay tuned for a larger Linux distribution comparison (and possibly some BSDs too) on this new Intel Xeon hardware in the days/weeks to come.