STAC Report: Redline/Intel/HP tick-to-trade

6.1 usec mean latency at market rate, with 1.4 usec jitter
STAC recently completed a "tick-to-trade" performance assessment of Redline Trading Solutions' InRush 3 Ticker Plant and Execution Gateway running on HP servers with Intel processors, Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN 10 Gigabit Adapters, and RHEL 6.1. Since the InRush 3 abandons hardware acceleration used in earlier versions of the InRush ticker plant, these systems used no FPGA or other non-Intel processors (other than the NIC processors for handling Layer 3 tasks).

Click here for detailed reports for two of the systems

One of these systems used the Intel Xeon E5-2690 (aka "Sandy Bridge") while the other used the Intel Xeon X5670 (aka Westmere). Results from tests of an earlier Sandy Bridge system configuration are available in the STAC Vault to qualified subscribers.

Based on a futures-trading use case, the tests measured latency from arrival of market data to transmission of orders--wire to wire. Corvil supplied the latency monitor, while Datacom Systems supplied the optical tap.

Headline results at market rate (STAC-T1.EMINI.v0.5.1x_MARKET) for the top-performing configuration (Sandy Bridge) were mean latency of 6.1 microseconds, max latency of 18.2 microseconds, and jitter of 1.4 microseconds.

The test cases were developed by STAC with input from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and a proprietary trading firm that trades on the CME. The tests utilized software available to STAC Benchmark Council members called the STAC-T Test Harness. STAC, Intel, and Redline Trading Solutions have proposed that these methodologies be considered as candidates for an official STAC Benchmark suite. If you are interested in weighing in on this, please let us know.