Benchmarking Caelus tutorials on different operating systems

Caelus 4.10 is supported on eight (8) operating systems (OS’s), Windows 7 Pro, Windows 8.1, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, RedHat EL 6.x, RedHat EL 7.x, Mac OSX 10.9.5 and 10.10. This article presents results from some benchmarking work conducted at Applied CCM on six of the supported operating systems. Support for Apple OSX was in development whilst this work was undertaken and therefore no results are available for those operating systems. Data from OSX will be the subject of a future article.

Results presented below are from most of the tutorials that are shipped with Caelus 4.10. Some longer running tutorials (e.g. LES motorbike) have been excluded due to the time it would have taken to run the simulation six times (once for each OS tested). To facilitate comparison each operating system was installed onto the same hardware and each tutorial executed. The execution time was taken from the log file for each simulation and the results for each tutorial have been normalised to the RHEL6.5 result, thus the computer specifications are irrelevant for this exercise.

simpleSolver

pisoSolver

pimpleSolver

SRFSimpleSolver

SRFPimpleSolver

buoyantBoussinesqSimpleSolver

buoyantSimpleSolver

Summary

From the cases tested some statistics can be generated as shown in the table below:

Operating System	Max	Min	Average	Standard Deviation
Windows 7 Pro	1.37	1.04	1.22	0.085
Windows 8.1	1.36	1.04	1.16	0.081
Ubuntu 12.04	1.03	0.94	1	0.019
Ubuntu 14.04	1.04	0.98	1.01	0.018
Red Hat EL 7	1.05	0.98	1.01	0.018

It is clear from the table that Windows 7 Professional is the slowest of all operating systems tested, on averaged being 22% slower than RHEL 6.5. Windows 8.1 followed closely behind being 16% slower on average than RHEL-6.5. The Windows operating systems also showed a greater standard deviation. All Linux flavoured operating systems showed similar speed and standard deviation.