STAC Report: Overclocked HPE Servers with 25GbE and SLES

Lowest max latency ever reported at both the base rate and very high rates

10 October 2017

We recently performed STAC-N1™ tests on an overclocked HPE Trade & Match server with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and a Mellanox network stack using 25 gigabit Ethernet.  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 XL170r Gen9 Servers with one Intel E5-1680 v3 (Haswell) processor per server at 4.5 GHz, boosted by custom HPE tools to enable over-clocking for high-frequency trading operations. In the servers were HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 2-port 640SFP28 Adapters, SUSE Linux ES 12 SP2, and Mellanox VMA 8.4.3.

Compared to all other public STAC-N1 reports of Ethernet-based SUTs, this SUT demonstrated:

• Lowest mean latency at both the base rate and the highest rate tested.
• Lowest max latency at the base rate.
• Lowest max latency at or above 1 million messages per second.
• Highest max rate reported: 1.6 million messages per second.
• 99.9999th percentile latency (six nines) of just 5 μsec at the base rate and 6 μsec at 1.6 million messages per second.

The report analyzes latencies and other metrics in detail. Premium subscribers have access to a CSV file with results for several message sizes beyond the standard size used for the report, a detailed STAC Configuration Disclosure, and a complete sosreport for the system.

If your firm does not have access to these materials, please take a minute to learn about subscription options.