Lightfleet's Host Bus Adapters under STAC-N1

Solution using Lightfleet Datagram Protocol gives lowest tail latencies to date at highest throughput

10 November 2015

STAC recently used the STAC-N1 benchmark suite to assess the performance of Lightfleet HBA FP1 network adapters on Dell PowerEdge R730 Servers with RHEL 7.1 using the Lightfleet Datagram Protocol over 10 Gigabit fiber. The STAC Report is available here.

This solution set new public records for both throughput and determinism:

• At the Base Rate of 100K msg/sec, this solution delivered the lowest maximum latency of any public report to date, beating the next best solution (SFC141110) by 6 microseconds.
• This solution supported the highest message rate publicly reported to date: 1.45 million messages per second.
• At the previous highest message rate of 1.4 million messages per second, this solution had substantially lower tail latencies than the next best solution (CHE130913), from 3 microseconds better 99.9th percentile latency to 91 microseconds better max latency.

The Lightfleet Datagram Protocol is how the host bus adapters tested here communicate with Lightfleet's optical "DataRotor" data-distribution modules (not tested here). It is the fifth protocol to be integrated with STAC-N1 (others being TCP, UDP, RDMA, and RDS).

The report linked above analyzes the latency in detail, along with throughput, CPU, and memory. Results for all message sizes, along with detailed configuration information, are available to STAC Benchmark Council members at the same pages as the reports.