Ubuntu 12.10 Virtualization vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.3

CentOS 6.3 experienced a large performance drop when using KVM virtualization for the NPB BT.A workload while the two releases of Ubuntu Linux experienced less of a performance hit for this workload.

The embarrassingly parallel results from NPB performed fairly well in all three cases. Ubuntu 12.10 delivered the best performance overall.

The Dolfyn and FFTE computational tests experienced low overhead in their KVM virtualized environments but the results were also uninteresting between Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04, and CentOS 6.3.