STAC Tests Latency on HP Blade Servers with Gigabit Ethernet, Voltaire InfiniBand
STAC has released a study of latency on HP c-Class Blade Servers with Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and Voltaire InfiniBand. The system used Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) 6, running on HP BL460c Blades with 2 x Dual Core Intel Xeon 5160 3.0 GHz processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4. STAC investigated latency on Gigabit Ethernet versus Voltaire InfiniBand using a traditional RMDS topology in an identical system environment. It also tested a stacked RMDS topology that maximised the utilisation of cores while also taking into consideration factors in real customer deployments.
Highlights of the testing include: the Voltaire InfiniBand solution showed significantly better latency than a pure Gigabit Ethernet environment in a traditional RMDS topology, running 39 per cent to 52 per cent faster across all ranges of update rates tested (1000 to 450,000 updates/sec); and stacking RMDS processes decreased latency by up to 176 microseconds, improving performance on a hybrid GbE/IB configuration by up to 52 per cent over the traditional topology on update rates up to 300,000 updates/sec.
Additionally, STAC was asked to validate the c-Class/IB environment for the Reuters Tick Capture Engine (RTCE). In these tests, both Ethernet and InfiniBand networks were validated for running RTCE in the c-Class environment.
The report is available at http://www.STACresearch.com.
Technorati Tags: STAC, HP, HP c-Class Blade Servers, Gigabit Ethernet, Voltaire, Voltaire InfiniBand, Intel, Dual Core Intel Xeon 5160, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4, Reuters Market Data System, RMDS, Reuters Tick Capture Engine, RTCE
