STAC Report: Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 with Intel Sapphire Rapids under STAC-M3 (tick analytics)

Lenovo and Intel’s Sapphire Rapids show generational improvements.

12 September 2023

STAC recently performed STAC-M3™ Benchmarks on the first stack involving Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPUs. The stack also included kdb+ 4.0, a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3, and Intel® Optane™ SSDs. 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 the baseline benchmark suite (code named Antuco).

The stack under test was KX's kdb+ 4.0 DBMS running on a 2-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 server with 2 x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6444Y 16-core CPU. Data were stored in 6.4 TB of Intel® Optane™ P5800X.

Lenovo chose to highlight that this solution was:

• Faster in 11 of 17 mean-response time benchmarks compared to a SUT with persistent memory and previous generations of the server, processor, STAC Pack, and OS (SUT ID KDB210317), including:
• 6x the speed in 10-user volume curve (STAC-M3.β1.10T.VOLCURV.TIME)
• 2.1x the speed in quarter high bid (STAC-M3.β1.1T.QTRHIBID.TIME)
• 1.8x the speed in 100-user volume weighted bid (STAC-M3.β1.100T.VWAB-D-NO.TIME)
• 1.4x the speed in both year high bid (STAC-M3.β1.1T.[YRHIBID | YRHIBID-2].TIME)
• The fastest in 9 of 17 mean-response time benchmarks when compared to all publicly disclosed STAC-M3 Antuco results for a single-server, 2-socket system running kdb+, including:
• 3.2x the speed of the previous best 10-user volume curve
  (STAC-M3.β1.10T.VOLCURV.TIME)
• 2.1x the speed of the previous best quarter high bid
  (STAC-M3.β1.1T.QTRHIBID.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.