STAC Report: STAC-N1 with AMD EPYC™ (Genoa) in HPE server

Generational improvements with AMD EPYC™ Genoa CPUs set records.

3 May 2023

Last fall, STAC performed the first STAC-N1 Benchmark tests on a solution based on AMD EPYC™ processors. Recently, AMD asked STAC to test an updated solution with the latest EPYC processor (code named Genoa) and corresponding upgrades to the server and software. The new solution increased throughput by 25% while reducing latency at both the base and max message rates, setting several records along the way. The STAC Report is available here.

STAC-N1 measures the performance of a host network stack (server, OS, drivers, host adapter) using a market data style workload. This benchmark was performed on a pair of HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen11 Servers, each with a single 32-core AMD EPYC™ 9374F processor @ 3.85 GHz (4.3 GHz Boost), an AMD Xilinx XtremeScale™ X2522-25G-PLUS Adapter and OpenOnload 8.0.0.34, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6. Communication was over 25GbE cross connects with forward error correction disabled.

AMD wished to highlight the following results:

• Compared to all publicly disclosed STAC-N1 results to date that used UDP and servers that were not over-clocked, for 264-byte messages this solution had:
• The lowest mean and 99th percentile latency for the base rate of 100k messages per second (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.LAT1)
• The highest maximum throughput tested of 1.5 million messages per second (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.TPUT1)
• The lowest 99th percentile and maximum latency at the highest rate tested for SupplyToReceive latency (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.LAT2)
• Compared to a solution with the same network card but a previous generation server, CPU, OS, and OpenOnload (AMD221001), this solution had:
• A maximum throughput tested that was 300,000 messages per second higher (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.TPUT1)
• A lower mean and maximum latency at the highest rate tested (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.LAT2)

The report analyzes latencies and other metrics in detail. Premium subscribers also have access to a detailed STAC Configuration Disclosure and a complete sosreport for the system.

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