STAC Report: 2x DDN AI400X2 and EXAScaler 6.1 under STAC-M3 (tick analytics)

DDN sets records at scale.

1 November 2022

STAC recently performed STAC-M3 Benchmarks on a scaled DDN AI400X2-based solution. The stack included DDN’s EXAScaler 6.1 software and 2 x DDN AI400X2 All-Flash appliances. The results are available here.

STAC-M3 is the set of industry standard enterprise tick-analytics benchmarks for database software/ hardware stacks that manage large time series of market data ("tick data"). In this project, we ran both the baseline benchmark suite (code named Antuco) and the optional scaling suite (code named Kanaga).

The stack under test (SUT) was KX’s kdb+ 4.0 Cloud Edition DBMS distributed across GIGABYTE H262-Z62 servers, each with 2 x AMD EPYC 7763 64-core CPUs and 512GiB of memory. The servers used DDN EXAScaler 6.1.0 software to access 2 x DDN AI400X2 All-Flash appliances through a parallel filesystem configured with a single shared namespace that provided 127TiB of usable storage capacity. The SUT used Compatibility Revision H of the kdb+ STAC Packs. DDN chose to highlight that this solution:

• Outperformed all publicly disclosed mean-response time results in 4 out of 7 100-user benchmarks
• 100-user intervalized statistics (STAC-M3.β1.100T.STATS-UI.TIME)
• 1-, 2-, and 3-year 100-user 12-day VWAB (STAC-M3.β1.100T.YR{1,2,3}VWAB-12D-HO.TIME)
• Was faster than a solution involving network-attached flash storage and 9 database servers (SUT ID KDB220506)
• in 13 out of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 6x speedup in 50-user intervalized stats (STAC-M3.β1.50T.STATS-UI.TIME)
• 5x speedup in 10-user aggregate stats (STAC-M3.β1.10T.STATS-AGG.TIME)
• 4.9x speedup in single-user intervalized stats (STAC-M3.β1.1T.STATS-UI.TIME)
• in 21 out of 24 Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 2.1 – 4.4x speedup in single-user high-bid (STAC-M3.β1.1T.{2,3,4,5}YRHIBID.TIME)
• Was faster than a solution in a public cloud involving a parallel filesystem with 15 database servers, 40 storage servers, and previous versions of the kdb+ STAC Packs (SUT ID KDB210507)
• in 13 out of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 6.5x speedup in 10-user volume curve (STAC-M3.β1.10T.VOLCURV.TIME)
• In 16 of 24 Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks, including:
  • 15.5 – 19.3x speedup in 10-user market snapshots (STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR{2,3,4,5}-MKTSNAP.TIME)

For details, please see the report at the link above. Premium subscribers have access to the code used in this project as well as the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution. To learn about subscription options, please contact us.