STAC Report: kdb+ scale tests on a single Lenovo server

4-socket server sets 5 kdb+ records in scale tests

1 November 2018

STAC recently performed both the baseline and scaling tests of STAC-M3 on a stack consisting of Kx Systems’ kdb+ 3.5 database running on a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR950 server containing 4 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 CPUs and 3TB DDR4, with data spread across 6TB Intel DC P4800X (Optane) SSDs and 56TB Intel DC P4510 (3D NAND) SSDs. The server had patches applied to mitigate Spectre & Meltdown security vulnerabilities.

The STAC reports are available here.

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). Lenovo chose to highlight that compared to all other publicly released results for solutions using the kdb+ database, this first-ever solution to run the full scale STAC-M3 Kanaga suite (48TB) in a single 4-processor server using a standard architecture set five new records in the following benchmarks:

• Year 5 market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR5-MKTSNAP.TIME)
  • 58% faster than the next best result
• Year 4 market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR4-MKTSNAP.TIME)
  • 46% faster than the next best result
• Year 3 market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR3-MKTSNAP.TIME)
  • 20% faster than the next best result
• Year 2 market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR2-MKTSNAP.TIME)
  • 13% faster than the next best result
• 50-user 12-day VWAB in Year 1 (STAC-M3.β1.50T.YR1VWAB-12D-HO.TIME)
  • 40% faster than the next best result

Details are in the STAC Reports at the link 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.)