STAC Report: BNT 10GigE Switch and Chelsio NIC with RMDS 6

Stack produces lowest latency and jitter ever reported with RMDS. Tuesday, 18 March 2008 - STAC has just released test results involving 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) technology from two vendors: Blade Network Technologies (BNT) and Chelsio Communications. BNT offers a 10GigE switch module for the IBM BladeCenter, and Chelsio provides 10 GigE NICs. We tested these under market data workloads because the vendors believed that the combination of the high-speed BNT switch with Chelsio's TCP Offload Engine (TOE) would improve both latency and throughput in market data environments. STAC tested this equipment using the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS). Running the standard Reuters Producer 50/50 fanout test with a stacked topology, we examined overall server output with and without TOE enabled. Then we performed the standard RMDS latency tests. In addition to the BNT and Chelsio networking products, the stack under test consisted of an IBM BladeCenter platform using Intel Xeon dual-core 3.0 GHz blades running Red Hat Enterprise Linux ver 5.1. Key results:

• Lowest mean latency ever reported with RMDS. Less than 0.9 milliseconds of end-to-end infrastructure latency at up to 600,000 updates per second in the low-latency configuration of RMDS.
• Lowest standard deviation of latency ever reported with RMDS. Less than 0.5 milliseconds at rates up to 600,000 updates per second.
• Very high output rate in the "Producer 50/50" fanout test of a stacked P2PS. 5.8 million updates per second, with 30% of this attributable to the TOE in the Chelsio NIC.
Report download here available to registered users at no cost.