Solaris beats Linux performance

Tuesday Mar 20, 2007

World Record SPECompL2001: Solaris beats RedHat Linux and The Sun Fire X4600 M2 delivers the best performance on the SPEC OMPL2001 benchmark suite of all x86 systems.

• Solaris 10 and Studio 11 duo help X4600 M2 perform 8% better than Red Hat Linux (RHEL4) and PathScale compiler on SPECompL2001.
• The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server in 4-socket configuration using dual-core AMD Opteron Model 8220 processors, produced best SPECompL2001 result of 111,893.
• The Sun Fire X4600 M2 beats the HP DL585 G2 (AMD Opteron 8220 4chips/8cores) using RedHat Linux by 9%
• The results show that the combination of Solaris 10 using Sun Studio 11 is unmatched by the competition for assisting users in writing parallel code.

SPECompL2001 (bigger is better, ordered by peak)

Result		Cores	Chips	Thrds	System
Peak	Base
111,893	105,465	8	8	2	Sun X4600M2 Opteron 8220 S10/SS11
103,466	100,610	8	8	2	Sun X4600M2 Opteron 8220 RHEL4u4, PathScale v2.5
102,283	99,907	8	8	2	HP DL585 G2 Opteron 8220SE, RHEL4u4, PathScale v2.5
92,725	92,418	16	16	1	HP Superdome 1.5GHz Itanium 2
79,627	68,051	24	24	1	Sun Fire 6800
44,376	42,400	16	16	1	HP Superdome 875MHz PA-8700+
42,864	41,056	16	16	1	HP server rp8400 (875MHz PA-8700+)

Benchmark Description

The SPEC OMPL2001 Benchmark Suite was released in June 2001 and tests HPC performance using OpenMP for parallelism. 9 programs (2 in C and 7 in Fortran) parallelized using OpenMP API.

Goals of suite are: first, target to Large-range (8-128 processor) parallel systems, 2nd have run rules, tools and reporting similar to SPEC CPU2000 and 3rd to have programs representative of HPC and Scientific Applications.

Results Summary

Result
	X8420 8-threads:		111893 SPECompL2001
Reference Date:			Mar 19, 2007
System:			Sun Fire X4600 M2
Total Number Processors:			4
Total Memory :			32 GB (16x4GB DIMMs), DDR667
Processor/GHz of Server:			Opteron 8220, 2.8 GHz
Operating System:			Solaris 10
Compiler:			Sun Studio 11

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of Mar 19, 2007, Sun result submitted to SPEC. Sun Fire X4600 M2 (S10/SS11, Opteron 8220, 8 cores, 4 chips, 8 threads), 111893 SPECompL2001. Sun Fire X4600 M2 (RHEL4u4, Opteron 8220, 8 cores, 4 chips, 8 threads), 103466 SPECompL2001. HP DL585 G2 Opteron 8220SE (RHEL4u4, Opteron 8220, 8 cores, 4 chips, 8 threads), 103466 SPECompL2001. Sockets refers to chips.

See Also

SPEC OMP2001 Page
SPEC Home Page
sun.com X4600 M2 Benchmark Page

Solaris, Linux, Windows

Monday Feb 05, 2007

Solaris can improve your performance and Solaris gives you great features. Sun really feels that Solaris has a strong lead over other operating systems. We've shown various head-to-head comparisons on this blog. You can see links to a few of those below.

It is also important to remember that Sun also has many important customers who are running RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, and Windows. So a variety of benchmarks are also done with those, as you can see in last week's entry on SPECjAppServer.

So expect to see results on a mix of operating systems as Sun fully understands different customers have different needs. We still believe most can get many benefits from moving to Solaris -- so if you are one of those people who can switch, the evidence continues to mount that it is a very good idea to use Solaris.

January 17, 2007
Variety ways Solaris is leading Linux

December 20, 2006
Solaris again beating Linux on benchmark

January 03, 2007
update: Solaris beating Linux Performance

September 22, 2006
Yet another Solaris v. Linux performance comparison

EDA vendors supporting Solaris:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/another_strong_isv_votes_for
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/eda_vendors_seeing_solaris_benefits

afternote:
I forgot to mention that Solaris is also Open:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/

...not something you see with IBM's AIX or HP/UX.