Red Hat Enterprise Linux Powers Scalable Computing Platforms with 10 New World Record Benchmarks

We’ve often talked about how Red Hat Enterprise Linux was fueling top benchmark results on the latest generation of Intel Xeon processors.

Today, we’re pleased to say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has again demonstrated how an OS platform can handle the rigors of highly multi-threaded processing and on-demand scaling. In the most recent set of benchmarks done with one of the latest cutting edge processors, the Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family, Red Hat Enterprise Linux claims 10 new world records. Here are these leading results at a glance:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has distanced itself from the rest of the platform pack when it comes to highly resource-intensive and scalable workloads that most modern enterprises use on a daily basis. While these workloads are generally diverse, they fundamentally are performing two types of operations: integer or floating point. Integer-intensive applications are usually transactional in nature and include applications such as databases, accounting, and financial software. On the other hand, engineering and science applications, as well as graphics intensive applications for modeling and computer aided engineering, all almost exclusively rely upon floating point operations.

Regardless of application type, Red Hat Enterprise Linux distinguished itself by showing industry leading capability and excellent scalability on both integer and floating point intensive suites of SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks while setting six world records (see table above). The two charts below offer another view into these six data points, depicting how the superior memory management and scheduling algorithms inherent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled near linear scalability across systems of increasing size.

Another worthwhile observation is around the reproduction and repetition of these results. As evident from a 3-way tie on SPECint_rate_base2006 benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered the same performance across similarly configured systems from multiple vendors demonstrating that OS capabilities are uniformly available across multiple system designs.

While all of these world record numbers are impressive, it’s important to note that Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t just an extreme computing platform – we believe that it is the perfect platform for every enterprise workload, meeting the needs of today while scaling to meet even the most extreme computing demands of tomorrow.

All results as of February 20th 2014. SPEC and the benchmark names SPECcpu, SPECjbb, SPEComp and SPECvirt_sc are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For more information about SPEC and its benchmarks see: www.spec.org