Amazon EC2 Cloud Compute Performance: December vs. February

With the Rodinia CPU benchmark there were no changes in performance except for Amazon Linux 2 being faster while Clear Linux remained the fastest overall.

With Rodinia's fluid dynamics solver, all of the distributions were running faster except for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS now running a bit slower with its latest updates.

The Himeno pressure solver was running marginally faster on Amazon Linux, Clear Linux, and SUSE with the latest state of these Linux distributions in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Amazon Linux 2 is no longer so slow in building out the Linux kernel but still came in behind the other tier-one Linux distributions, On some systems we saw the KPTI/Retpoline patches impact the compilation performance due to all the I/O activity, but that wasn't the case here.

The Perl benchmark shows several of the Linux distributions running slower with their latest updates, albeit it's a sub-second difference.