Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks, 6-Way Linux OS EC2 Compute Cloud Comparison

First up was the Rodinia OpenMP LavaMD particle benchmark. All of the tests of Rodinia were done using OpenMP (safely ignoring any OpenCL reference in the build string due to how PTS automatically just captures the last built test for Rodinia depending upon if OpenCL headers/libraries are present or not, but selecting the OpenMP test at run-time). Amazon Linux 2 with its GCC7 compiler stack yields much better performance over the older Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09. However, Amazon Linux was still slower than SUSE, Ubuntu, and Clear Linux. Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution took first place by a very significant margin -- twice as fast as the second place OS, Ubuntu.

With the computational fluid dynamics solver in Rodinia, Amazon Linux 2 is indeed a big performance upgrade over the original Amazon Linux AMI. In this case Amazon Linux 2 secured a first place finish and was even a hair ahead of Clear Linux.

With the Go Benchmarks and looking at the JSON parsing performance, Clear Linux was the fastest while Amazon Linux 2 this time regressed in speed.

While in the Go benchmark's build test, Amazon Linux 2 had a slight advantage over Clear Linux.

But Clear Linux rounded out the Go language benchmarks by winning in the garbage collection benchmark by a slim margin with Amazon Linux 2 having regressed.