Hi Bill,

Estimated relative performance of Maple across different operating systems and architectures is one of the ideas behind this post about a possible Maple benchmark. The question that I mostly had in mind when posting that was: which platform does Maple perform best upon?

Others noted that there could be some good other benefits too. It might illustrate how different releases of Maple performed, on the same configuration. That could lead to insight about what's improved, what's deteriorated, and where subsequent improvement efforts for Maple itself could be well spent.

So maybe it would help you a bit, if we could summarize some of the differences in Maple on various platforms.

trunc(evalhf(Digits)) is 14 on MS-Windows, and 15 elsewhere. That's the cut-off value of the Digits Maple environment variable, above which quite a bit of modern Maple will use software floats. Below that threshold those parts of Maple (LinearAlgebra, Optimization, Statistics, evalf/Int) can use hardware double-precision floats and compute much faster (and without producing so much software garbage, which must be managed). It's also the working precision at which Maple's faster floating-point `evalhf` interpreter operates. So,, on MS-Windows, Maple's cut-off for these things is 1 decimal digit of precision less. This cut-off value doesn't really affect exact symbolic computations, though.

I have heard reports, but never seen hard figures, that MS-Windows is by far the leading platform for sales of Maple. This makes sense to me, especially with respect to my subjective experiences of slightly superior "look & feel" of Maple on Windows.

Some high-difficulty (non-officially supported) tweaking of Maple is easier on Linux. See here, and here.

This is an appropriate moment to mention that Maple's Classic graphical user interface is not available on OSX for Maple 10 & 11. It is not officially supported on 64bit Linux either, but here is a post that shows how it can be done.

You might also be interested in this post, which briefly discusses some performance differences between 32bit and 64bit Maple running on the same Linux machine and OS. That also arose briefly in this thread, and is something else into which a good Maple benchmark suite might provide insight.

I've noticed that running multiple invocations of Maple (all of Maple, separatey and concurrently, not just multiple worksheets or Documents) is handled very much better by Linux than by Windows. Also, I have seen Windows and OSX machines suffer more when hit hard by highly resource intensive Maple calculations. For example, when running on a network, the Windows and OSX machines seem much more likely to lose remote drive mounts and network services. Those are operating system distinctions, and not apsects of Maple implementation. They may, or may not, matter to you.

I'll state my subjective preference: a 64bit Linux distribution that is supported by Maplesoft and from which one can also install optional 32bit runtime OS components. For Maple 11, the 64bit SuSE 10 distributuon might be OK, though I have not used it. On the hardware side, I'd go for a machine that could run such an OS, either multi-core Athlon64 (X2) or Intel Core2 Duo.

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