STAC Report: kdb+ 4.0 on 9 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers accessing a Dell EMC PowerScale F900 All-Flash, 3-node cluster (tick analytics)

Improvement in 14 mean-response time benchmarks over previous generation

26 October 2021

STAC recently performed STAC-M3^TM Benchmarks on a stack involving the densest Dell EMC PowerScale storage device to feature all-NVMe media. The stack included kdb+ 4.0, a Dell server cluster, and a 3-node PowerScale F900 cluster. 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 9 Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers, each with 2 x 18 core Intel^® Xeon^® Gold 6254 CPU @ 3.10GHz and 384GiB DRAM. Data was accessed via NFS 3 and stored in a Dell EMC PowerScale F900 All-Flash Scale-Out NAS 3-node cluster with 251TiB total physical storage capacity.

Dell chose to highlight that this solution was:

• Faster than a solution involving 4 database servers accessing an earlier generation of Dell EMC’s flash storage appliance with kdb+ 3.6 (SUT ID KDB190430) in 14 of 17 mean-response time STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks, including:
• 5.3x speed-up in the 10-user market snapshot (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
• 4.9x speed-up in the 10-user volume curve (STAC-M3.β1.10T.VOLCURV.TIME)
• 2.9x speed-up in the 100-user 12-day VWAB (STAC-M3.v1.100T.VWAB-12D-NO.TIME)
• 2.7x speed-up in the 100-user unpredictable interval stats (STAC-M3.ß1.100T.STATS-UI.TIME)
• Faster than a solution involving a parallel filesystem with 14 database servers and 18 storage servers with kdb+3.6 (SUT ID KDB200401) in 3 of 17 mean-response time STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks:
• 9.8x speed-up in the single-user NBBO (STAC-M3.β1.1T.NBBO.TIME)
• 3.6x speed-up in the 10-user volume curve (STAC-M3.β1.10T.VOLCURV.TIME)
• 17% faster in the single-user VWAB (STAC-M3.v1.1T.VWAB-D.TIME)

The report and detailed configuration information are now available to eligible subscribers.

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.