Records Set With STAC-M3 Benchmark for Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 With Optane DC Persistent Memory

The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 server has set eleven performance world records with the Antuco suite of the STAC-M3 benchmark.

This document summarizes the STAC-M3 benchmark result for the ThinkSystem SR650 that was published on April 4, 2019. The document lists the result, summarizes the major components of the configuration under test, and provides the link to the relevant benchmark organization’s web site for details about the result.

Introduction
TheThinkSystem SR650 configured with Optane DC Persistent Memory (DCPMM), the new second-generation Intel Corp.’s Xeon Scalable processors (formerly codenamed ‘Cascade Lake’) and the Kx Systems kdb+ database has set performance world records with the Antuco suite of the STAC-M3 benchmark.

These benchmark results, published in a STAC Report (SUT ID KDB190320b registration required) on April 2, 2019, demonstrate that the SR650 continues the company’s leadership with breaking performance for the financial services industry.

This system and its ThinkSystem SR950 4-socket counterpart (see STAC report SUT ID KDB190322b registration required) are systems containing Optane DC Persistent Memory for which STAC-M3 results have been disclosed.

The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is an industry standard for testing solutions that enable high-speed analytics on time series data, such as tick-by-tick market data , also known as tick database stacks. The base suite, code-named ‘Antuco’, contains a range of test cases with varying levels of CPU and storage-I/O intensity.

Compared to previous publicly reported Antuco suite results for single-node two-socket servers running the Kx Systems kdb+ database, the SR650 with DCPMM set records in 11 of 17 mean response-time benchmark category records:

• STAC-M3.β1.100T.STATS-UI.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.100T.VWAB-12D-NO.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.10T.STATS-UI.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.10T.THEOPL.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.1T.MOHIBID.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.1T.QTRHIBID.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.1T.STATS-UI.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.1T.VWAB-D.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.1T.YRHIBID-2.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.1T.YRHIBID.TIME

• STAC-M3.β1.50T.STATS-UI.TIME

SR650 was configured as follows for benchmark audit:

• ThinkSystem SR650

• Two Xeon Platinum 8280L Processors (28 cores, 2.7GHz, 38.5MB last level cache)

• 768GB memory (12x64GB RDIMMs@2,933MHz)

• 12x512GB Optane DC Persistent Memory (DCPMM) modules

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 with xfs V5

• Kx Systems kdb+ 3.6

• Security patches for the range of Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities including 1, 2, 3 and L1TF

About ThinkSystem SR650
TheThinkSystem SR650 server supports Optane DC Persistent Memory and up to two second-generation Xeon Scalable processors. It features up to 36% total performance improvement compared to the previous generation and supports two 300W high-performance GPUs and ML2 NIC adapters with shared management. The company’s AnyBay technology provides the flexibility to mix-and-match SAS/SATA HDDs/SSDs and NVMe SSDs in the same drive bays. Support is available for up to 24 NVMe drives.

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For medium to large enterprises, and managed and cloud service providers, ThinkSystem SR650 is a 2U, two-socket server-the most widely used server type worldwide. It’s engineered to deliver performance with 205W CPUs, low-latency NVMe drives, and high-power GPUs.

With the firm’s history of reliability, the flexible and configurable SR650 is a platform for HCI or SDS.

It provides a solid foundation for:

• Transforming physical resources into services, using validated designs for hybrid cloud

• Performing analytics on streaming data, using validated designs for big data

• Increasing productivity of virtualized transactional systems, using validated designs for OLTP databases.

The company’s XClarity controller is a new hardware embedded management engine common in every ThinkSystem server. It features an uncluttered GUI, industry standard Redfish-compliant REST APIs, and enables booting in half the time of prior generation servers, with up to 6x faster firmware updates.

XClarity Administrator is a virtualized application that centrally manages ThinkSystem servers, storage, and networking. Via reusable patterns and policies, it ramps up and scales infrastructure provisioning and maintenance. It serves as a central integration point to extend data center management processes to physical IT. Running XClarity Integrators in external IT applications, or integrating through REST APIs, helps speed services provisioning, streamline IT management, and contain costs.