The performance of trade and match servers can be a critical differentiator for financial trading houses. Latency is often the most problematic bottleneck affecting an institution’s ability to quickly match and complete trades. Earlier this month, HPE’s ProLiant XL170r Gen9 Trade & Match Servers demonstrated the lowest max latency of any systems tested using the STAC-N1 test according to STAC.

Compared to all other public STAC-N1 reports of Ethernet-based SUTs, this SUT (stack under test) demonstrated:

• The lowest max latency at both the base rate (100K messages per second) and the highest rate tested (1M messages per second). Max at 1 million messages per second was 18 microseconds vs. the previous best 51 microseconds (SUT ID SFC141110).
• The lowest mean latency at both the base rate and the highest rate tested.

STAC notes, “[Because STAC-N1 is not tied to a particular network API, it can be used to compare stacks using different APIs (for example, UDP/Ethernet vs. RDMA/Infiniband). However, STAC-N1 is often used to compare different stacks using the same API (for example, UDP with one vendor’s NIC and driver vs. UDP with another vendor’s NIC and driver). When making the latter type of comparison, it is essential that the SUTs you are comparing used the same STAC-N1 binding.”

In this instance, the stack under test consisted of UDP over 10GbE using OpenOnload on RHEL 6.6 with Solarflare SFN 8522-PLUS Adapters on HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 Trade & Match Servers.

Test details: “The STAC-N benchmark was performed on two of the 4 HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 Servers in a 2U HPE Apollo r2600 chassis, a component of the HPE Apollo 2000 System. The HPE Apollo Trade and Match Server Solution is designed to minimize system latency, utilizing the HPE Apollo 2000 system that has been optimized for applications performing best at maximum frequency and with lower core count. This solution utilizes custom tools to enable over-clocked processors for improved performance specifically for high-frequency trading operations. The HPE Trade and Match Server Solution building block is based on the HPE Apollo 2000 System. Each chassis can accommodate up to four HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 Server trays, supporting one Intel Xeon E5-1680v3 processor each.

“The STAC N1 Benchmark exercised two of four HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 Servers in a 2U HPE Apollo r2600 Chassis, with each server configured with one Intel E5-1680v3 processor and eight 32 GiB DIMMs. The chassis was configured with two 1400W Power supplies.”

HPE says the results are significant in demonstrating the strength of line of its trade and match servers. Link to full STAC report (SFC170206): https://stacresearch.com/