8-Way Linux Distribution Comparison On A Dual Xeon Scalable Gold Server

First up was the Parboil benchmark to leverage throughput computing performance via the University of Illinois' IMPACT Research Group. This Lattice-Boltzmann Method Fluid Dynamics workload leveraging OpenMP is able to make use of the system's 80 threads. With each distribution out of the box, Debian 9.1 was the fastest right in line with Intel's Clear Linux while at almost half the speed were Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS and openSUSE Leap 42.3. It was very interesting to see the wide range of out-of-the-box performance with this testing at scale across so many threads compared to our usual smaller tests.

Parboil's Distance-Cutoff Coulombic Potential test is much shorter than the other OpenMP tests and here it shows Clear Linux being the fastest while Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS remains the slowest.

And then in Parboil's 3-D Stencil Operation test, Clear Linux remained the fastest while Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS was no longer the slowest, which this time was openSUSE Tumbleweed and next openSUSE Leap.

Parboil's Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Gridding test is much longer and here openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian 9 managed to pull ahead of Clear Linux and the other Linux distributions that were performing around the same speed.

With FFTW, CentOS Linux 7 on its older compiler was running faster than the other tested Linux distributions with more recent versions of the GNU Compiler Collection.