STAC Report: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 8-node Intel cluster under STAC-A2 (derivatives risk)

Numerous new records for non-accelerated cloud solutions

23 January 2024

STAC recently performed STAC-A2 Benchmark tests on the first CPU-based STAC-A2 solution in the Oracle Cloud.

The STAC Report is available here.

The stack consisted of the STAC-A2 Pack for Intel® oneAPI (Rev N) with 8 x Oracle Cloud Infrastructure BM.Optimized.3.36 bare-metal servers, each server providing 2 x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6354 (Ice Lake) CPUs and 512 GiB of DRAM, networked via RDMA over 100 Gbps Ethernet.

STAC-A2 is the technology benchmark standard based on financial market risk analysis. Designed by quants and technologists from some of the world's largest banks, STAC-A2 reports the performance, scaling, quality, and resource efficiency of any technology stack that is able to handle the workload (Monte Carlo estimation of Heston-based Greeks for a path-dependent, multi-asset option with early exercise).

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) wished to highlight the following results:

• Compared to all publicly reported, non-accelerated cloud solutions to date, this solution set numerous records:
• The best price-performance (19,788 options / USD) over 1 hour and 3 days of continuous use¹
• The highest throughput (119.2 options / second)²
• The fastest warm time (24.3 ms) in the baseline Greeks benchmark³
• The fastest cold (2.98 s) and warm (1.96 s) times in the large Greeks benchmarks⁴
• The most correlated assets (145) and Monte Carlo paths (7,000,000) simulated in 10 minutes⁵
• Compared to the previously most price-performant, non-accelerated cloud solution (SUT ID INTC221006b), this solution demonstrated a 1.3x price-performance advantage (options / USD) for 1 hour and 3 days of continuous use¹


• Compared to a 10-server, non-accelerated cloud-based solution using previous-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor (Cascade Lake) CPUs (SUT ID INTC210331), this 8-server solution demonstrated:
• Over 1.5x price-performance advantages (options / USD) for 1 hour and 3 days of continuous use¹
• Over 1.4x the speed in warm runs of the baseline Greeks benchmark³
• Over 1.2x the speed in warm runs of the large Greeks benchmark⁴
• Over 1.1x the speed in cold runs of the large Greeks benchmark⁴

For details, please see the report at the link above. Premium subscribers have access to the code used in this project as well as the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution. To learn about subscription options, please contact us.

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¹STAC-A2.β2.HPORTFOLIO.PRICE_PERF.[BURST | PERIODIC]
²STAC-A2.β2.HPORTFOLIO.SPEED
³STAC-A2.β2.GREEKS.TIME.WARM
⁴STAC-A2.β2.GREEKS.10-100K.1260.TIME.[COLD | WARM]
⁵STAC-A2.β2.GREEKS.[ MAX_ASSETS | MAX_PATHS]