STAC Report: Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2 with Intel Ice Lake under STAC-M3 (tick analytics)

Intel Ice Lake in Lenovo 2-socket server sets records

16 June 2021

STAC recently performed STAC-M3™ Benchmarks on the first stack involving Intel’s Ice Lake CPUs. The stack included kdb+ 4.0, a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2, Intel^® 8360Y 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 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 V2 server with 2 x Intel^® Xeon^® Platinum 8360Y (Ice Lake) 36-core CPU. Data were stored in 16 x 256GiB of Intel^® Optane^™ Persistent Memory 200 Series DIMMs in Storage over App Direct Mode.

Lenovo chose to highlight that this solution:

• Was faster in 14 of 17 mean-response time benchmarks than a similar solution with the previous generations of CPU, Optane memory, and kdb+ (SUT ID KDB190320b), including:
  • 6.1x the speed in market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
  • 2.3x the speed in write time (STAC-M3.β1.1T.WRITE.TIME)
  • 2.1x the speed in both 50-user and 100-user intervalized statistics
    (STAC-M3.β1.{50,100}T.STATS-UI.TIME)

• Outperformed all publicly disclosed results for solutions involving kdb+ on a single server, 2-socket system in 14 of 17 mean-response time benchmarks, including:
  • 2.2x the speed vs. the previous best market snapshot
    (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME vs. SUT ID KDB171010)
• Outperformed all publicly disclosed results in 4 of 17 mean-response time benchmarks

Details are in the reports at the links above. Premium 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.