STAC Report: RMDS 6 on HP c-Class: Latency Comparisons of Gigabit and Voltaire InfiniBand

Voltaire-based market data stack was 39% to 52% faster than a GigE-based stack. STAC has just released a study of latency on HP c-Class Blade Servers with Gigabit Ethernet and Voltaire InfiniBand. The system used RMDS 6, running on HP BL460c Blades with 2 x Dual Core Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 GHz processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4. In the project, STAC investigated latency on Gigabit Ethernet versus Voltaire InfiniBand using a traditional RMDS topology in an identical system environment. We also tested a stacked RMDS topology that maximized the utilization of cores while also taking into consideration factors in real customer deployments. Highlights of the testing include: - The Voltaire InfiniBand solution showed significantly better latency than a pure Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) environment in a traditional RMDS topology, running 39% to 52% faster across all ranges of update rates tested (1000 to 450,000 updates/sec). - Stacking RMDS processes decreased latency by up to 176 microseconds, improving performance on a hybrid GbE/IB configuration by up to 52% over the traditional topology on update rates up to 300,000 updates/sec. Additionally, STAC was asked to validate the c-Class/IB environment for the Reuters Tick Capture Engine (RTCE). In these tests, both Ethernet and InfiniBand networks were validated for running RTCE in the c-Class environment. Click here to download the report.