STAC Report: kdb+ 4.0 with Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2, Intel 8380HL (Cooper Lake) CPUs and Optane PMem Series 200 under STAC-M3 (tick analytics)

Lenovo 4-socket server sets 4 records with latest Intel® CPU and Optane PMem

15 December 2020

STAC recently performed STAC-M3™ Benchmarks on a stack involving kdb+ 4.0, a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 V2, Intel® 8380HL CPUs, and Intel® Optane PMem 200 Series. 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) on a truncated 2-year Kanaga dataset.

The stack under test (SUT) was Kx's kdb+ 4.0 DBMS running on a Lenovo SR860 V2 server with 4 x 28-core Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8380HL (Cooper Lake) CPUs, 24 x 512GiB Intel® PMem 200 Series DIMMs in Storage Over App Direct Mode with Sector mode namespaces, and 6 x 8TB Intel DC P4510 NVMe SSD (3D NAND) drives. The database primarily resided in 12 TiB of persistent memory.

Lenovo chose to highlight that this solution:

• Outperformed all publicly disclosed results in 4 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks
• Outperformed all publicly disclosed results for solutions involving a single server in 8 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmark
• Compared to a similar system with the previous generations of CPU, Optane memory and kdb+ 3.6 (SUT ID KDB190322b):
• was faster in 14 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 6.7x speed-up in 10-user aggregate stats (STAC-M3.β1.10T.STATS-AGG.TIME)
• 4.4x speed-up in 10-user market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
• was faster in 8 of 10 2-year Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 5.0x speed-up for year-1 market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.TRUNC.10T.YR2-MKTSNAP.TIME)
• 4.9x speed-up for year-2 market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.TRUNC.10T.YR1-MKTSNAP.TIME)
• Compared to a similar system with the previous generation of CPU, kdb+ 3.6, and only NVMe 3D NAND SSDs (no Optane PMem) (KDB190322a):
• was faster in 15 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 14x speed-up in 10-user market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
• was faster in 9 of 10 2-year Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 17x to 18x speed-up for 10-user market snapshots in both years (STAC-M3.β1.TRUNC.10T.YR[n]-MKTSNAP.TIME)

A companion STAC Vault Report (SUT ID KDB201110) provides results from Intel running the Antuco and Kanaga test suites on a nearly identical SUT. The Vault Report's SUT uses a single SSD and highlights the performance differences of Optane's Storage Over App Direct Mode configured with Filesystem-DAX mode namespaces.

Details are in the STAC Report at the link above. Eligible subscribers have access to the STAC Vault Report, code used in these projects, and the micro-detailed configuration information for the solutions. (To learn about subscription options, please contact us.)