Solaris 10 Outperforms Linux: same MCAD software & same hardware

Tuesday Apr 10, 2007

Solaris 10 outperforms Linux by more than 25% on some tests when running the same applications on the same hardware. This helps prove that Solaris is a very high-performance operating system.

Pro/E is the foremost MCAD system and is distributed to major engineering corporations worldwide. Most Product Life Management systems (PLM) have seamless links to this biggest and best MCAD system. This includes all of the major MCAE ISV applications.

The Pro/E Wildfire 3 OCUS V5 benchmarks were used to demonstrate this Solaris superiority over Linux. These benchmarks are endorsed by Pro/E users as being very representative of typical and most frequently used operations that include large memory requirements associated with the increasingly commonplace large assemblies now seen that exceed 32-bit capabilities.

The Solaris Studio compilers and associated performance libraries continue to make applications perform better on X64 platforms relative to builds of the same applications using other compilers, performance libraries, and operating systems on the same platforms.

In fact a recent Desktop Engineering Article demonstrated that Sun Ultra 40 M2 desktops with four large capacity 146 GB 15K rpm internal drives, 2-sockets with dual core 3.0 GHz Opteron 2222 processors, and 32 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 memory (8 4 GB dimms) can function essentially as a personal server permitting the engineer to perform design operations with his MCAD system and concurrently perform CPU and I/O intensive design verification analyses:
http://www.deskeng.com/Articles/Feature/A-Server-on-Every-Desk-200702081652.html

The Sun desktops use the nVidia Quadro FX framebuffers that allow the user to perform MCAD or even more graphics intensive operations in a minimum of rendering time. Sun desktops equipped with the high end framebuffer offerings have set world records with graphics intensive benchmarks such as the SPEC APC UGS-NX3 benchmark:
http://www.spec.org/gpc/apc.data/specapc_nx3_summary.html

as well as the Ensight engineering visualization benchmark:
http://www.ensight.com/rendering-performance-tests.html

The Pro/E Wildfire 3 MCAD OCUS V5 (time in seconds)

Solaris 10 vs. Linux on X64 (Sun Ultra 40 M2 - same hardware)

	Total	Graphics	CPU	Disk I/O	Solaris 10 %Faster
32-bit Normal Benchmark
Solaris 10	1810	913	893	96	25%
SuSE Linux 10	2271	990	1278	107
64-bit Large-Memory Benchmark
Solaris 10	5224	1202	4008	388	6%
SuSE Linux 10	5563	1373	4164	441

Configuration

Sun Ultra 40 M2 desktop
2x2.8 GHz DC Opteron 2220's
8 GB (2x4x1 667 MHz DDR2 dimms)
1x nVidia Quadro FX 5500
Solaris 10
64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise for Desktop (SLED 10)
Application: 64-bit Pro/E Wildfire 3
Benchmark: Pro/E OCUS V5 (32-bit Normal benchmark, 64-bit Large Memory benchmark)

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Posted at 01:56PM Apr 10, 2007 in Benchmarks
Tags: linux mcad solaris sun suse