Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Linux Performance Evolution Since Launch

With Xeon Scalable Ice Lake having enjoyed great launch day Linux support as is usual for Intel with their vast (and timely!) open-source Linux contributions, for some workloads the performance is unchanged since launch as even GCC 11 had Ice Lake support and there was good support in the kernel ahead of these server processors shipping.

But still software performance optimizations are a never-ending game both hardware-specific work and general kernel and compiler optimizations... With the Rodinia HPC benchmark for its Leukocyte OpenMP test case it enjoyed some very sizable improvements with the latest open-source Linux software.

NAMD itself remains on v2.14 for the latest upstream and when running on the latest Linux distributions was one of the rare cases where it was a little bit slower than in early 2021.

The MrBayes biology software enjoyed some small speed-ups on Ubuntu and Clear Linux while now CentOS Stream is much faster and performing aligned with the other two. The big CentOS Stream speed-up is the shift from CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9 with now having the much newer GCC compiler by default and that benefiting heavily in the case of MrBayes.

Intel's Clear Linux distribution was benefiting more than the other two for squeezing additional performance out of the Xcompact3D Fortran-written incompressible Navier-Stokes equation solver.