STAC Report: NovaSparks FPGA appliance and STAC-M1

At 20x market data rate, mean latency was 1.4 microseconds, and jitter was 150 nanoseconds.

3 June 2013 - New York

STAC recently put the NovaSparks Gen2 FPGA Appliance to the test and has just published the results. The benchmark methodology was STAC-M1 v2.0, the industry standard benchmark for market data feed handler solutions, with an addendum that specifies tests using a repeatable replay of a 10Gb NASDAQ TotalView (TVITCH) 4.1 feed capture. These tests require the solution to manage order books for each symbol, while the test harness measures wire-to-memory latency during both the market-open and market-close periods.

During replay at 20 times recorded market data volumes, the NovaSparks solution demonstrated mean latency of just 1.4 microseconds, along with 99.9th percentile latency of just 2.8 microseconds. Jitter (standard deviation) was just 0.12 microseconds at 2x market rate and 0.15 microseconds at 20x market rate.

The stack under test consisted of the NovaSparks appliance and a consumer application running on an IBM server supplied by Netlist:

Appliance -

• NovaSparks Gen2 FPGA Appliance with NASDAQ ITCH Book Building Gateware 2.3

Consumer -

• NovaSparks Messaging API 2.1
• IBM System x3650 M4 Server
• Netlist Hypercloud HCDIMMs
• Red Hat Enterprise 6.3
• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2690 2.90 GHz

The test harness used TS-Associates’ TipOff and Gigamon Fiber Optic Tap for wire-based observation, along with TS-Associates’ Application Tap cards for precise in-memory observation. A Symmetricom SyncServer S350 served as the time source for the harness.

The report is available to all subscribers.

Configuration details for STAC-M1 Benchmarks (exact hardware and software versions, OS configuration, core bindings, partitioning, etc.) are published in a separate Configuration Disclosure document.

Qualified members of the STAC Benchmark Council can access the Configuration Disclosure here. 

The Configuration Disclosure may be requested by Observer Members as their complimentary report.