STAC Reports: kdb+ on Skylake- and Optane-based Lenovo systems under STAC-M3

Servers with Skylake processors and Optane drives set multiple STAC-M3 records

30 October 2017

STAC recently used STAC-M3 benchmarks to test two Lenovo systems that contained Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 processors and Intel SSD DC P4800X (Optane) drives:

• A 2-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 with 1.5TB DRAM and 6 x Optane drives, using the STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks (KDB171010)
• A 4-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR950 with 3TB DRAM and 6 x Optane drives, using the STAC-M3 Shasta benchmarks (KDB171024)

The STAC Reports are available at the links above.

STAC-M3 is the set of industry standard enterprise tick-analytics benchmarks for database solutions that manage large time series of market data (tick data). The Antuco suite contains the baseline benchmarks. The Shasta suite is designed to test the real-world performance of operations on a dataset of a few terabytes. It is the same as the baseline Antuco suite except that under Shasta, the stack under test (SUT) may pre-load data into memory, and there is no requirement to clear the filesystem cache between benchmarks. Results highlights:

• Compared to previous publicly reported STAC-M3 Antuco results for single-node 2-socket servers running kdb+, the solution based on the ThinkSystem SR650 set records in 11 of the 17 mean response-time benchmarks of the Antuco suite.
• Compared to a nearly identical system with previous-generation technology (NAND flash drives, SUT ID KDB170703), the performance of this solution was:
  • 7.5x in the market snap benchmark (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
  • 3.0x in the week-high bid benchmark (STAC-M3.β1.1T.WKHIBID.TIME)
  • 2.6x in the theoretical P&L benchmark (STAC-M3.β1.10T.THEOPL.TIME)
  • 2.5x in the multi-user VWAB benchmark (STAC-M3.β1.100T.VWAB-12D-NO.TIME)
• Compared to all previous publicly reported STAC-M3 Shasta results, the solution based on the ThinkSystem SR950 set records in 9 of 15 required mean response-time benchmarks.

Details are in the STAC Reports linked above. Premium subscribers have access to the code used in this project and the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution. (To learn about subscription options, please contact us.)