After reading the thread [1] I am wondering if it wouldn't be nice to have a reference operating system for benchmarking. I don't know much about computers, so I'm not sure if this makes sense.
Argument for using clearlinux [2] to produce reproducible OS images for benchmarking x86-64 hardware:
Hernan argued in several posts for using a commercial Fortran compiler over e.g. gfortran, and I guess Intel fortran compiler is the most commonly used on x86-64. I'm using Arch Linux and briefly looked into setting up a toolchain for the ifort, but gave up. Then I remembered that Intel distributes its own linux [2], and I thought: maybe it would make sense to build a benchmarking-os from their Linux distro. I think they offer reproducible image builds, i.e. one can reproduce the exact same OS image from a build script. Not sure if this similar to Nixos or Guix in terms of reproducibility, but the main point is of course that Intel is both the linux distro vendor and the CPU designer. One would expect that they know how to optimize their linux distro for their hardware. (on the other hand, AMD uses the same instruction set but probably implements it differently - not sure if there is an a-priori advantage of using clearlinux?).
On the forum everybody could then publish:
*) the hardware
*) the build script for the clearlinux image
*) the ROMS benchmark configuration (tiling etc.)
*) all the compiler flags
Then people with a similar hardware could test by re-building the image, and try to improve the compiler settings, and share them again.
I'm not sure if all the dependencies for the ROMS benchmark are packaged in clearlinux (openmpi etc and netcdf assuming I/O is of interest), but I think they would package the most important ones. Last time I checked, the major package missing was ifort itself, I think I read this was because of licensing. But I also read that ifort is now free (of cost) for people to download. So one would have to download the correct ifort package from some archive.
[1] viewtopic.php?p=7771
[2] https://clearlinux.org/