tbdCorp and HP Break the 1 Million Update Per Second Barrier with RMDS

tbdCorp and HP achieved several new milestones in RMDS performance, using the latest AMD-powered HP servers.

In the project, tbdCorp optimized and benchmarked the Reuters Market Data System on the HP DL585 using dual-core 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron servers.  Click here for a copy of the full report.

Highlights:

• First benchmark to achieve 1M updates per second end-to-end through a single RMDS server.  The core RMDS infrastructure components take in and deliver data updates from vendors, exchanges, interdealer brokers, and internal sources.  Their performance is critical to a firm’s ability to handle geometric data growth without dramatically increasing latency and cost.  In this benchmark, tbdCorp enabled each of the core RMDS components to take in and transmit over 1M updates per second.
• Achieved less than 1 millisecond of end-to-end infrastructure latency at up to 350K updates per second.  There is a tradeoff between latency and throughput. Many clients are interested in the amount of traffic a system can support without increasing latency beyond some threshold.
• First RMDS test to exploit the power of multicore technology.  RMDS has not traditionally leveraged much more than two processors or cores per server.  However, chip vendors are putting multiple cores onto CPUs, plus many clients want to leverage the economics of 4-processor servers.  In these benchmarks, tbdCorp has demonstrated configurations that leverage the power of machines with 8 cores.