Choosing a Kernel type for arithmetic calculations

Question

From this wiki page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/RealTimeKernel i see many type of linux kernel available for the ubuntu distro.

I use a lot of computation programs which use many arithmetic calculations. Which type do you think is the most performant in my case ?

I have an Intel i7 processor and an ubuntu 12.04 x64.

Answer 1

I use a lot of computation programs which use many arithmetic calculations. Which type do you think is the most performant in my case ?

The low-latency or realtime kernels are NOT relevant for computation-heavy applications; their use is when instant response to events is needed --- think audio recording on one end, and the Space Shuttle on the other end. In fact, a very preemption-sensitive kernel (what all those you linked to are) can end up reducing the performance of compute-heavy programs (because of all the interrupts that are generated).

If this is a purely computational/server system which is NOT used (or rarely used) as an interactive desktop, what you want is a kernel compiled with the CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE option, the help for which says:

Select this option if you are building a kernel for a server or scientific/computation system, or if you want to maximize the raw processing power of the kernel, irrespective of scheduling latencies.

You can also try setting a lower timer frequency than 1000 Hz (the default), but this will affect interactive performance (mouse/keyboard movements, etc.).

There are many other options you can tweak in the kernel config to incrementally improve performance for computation, but doing an overview of all of them is beyond the scope of an AskUbuntu answer :)

In short: stick with the regular kernel if you also use your computer as a desktop. The gains to be had with tweaking are usually minimal -- it's not like it will suddenly improve performance by 25%.