Novell, HP and Intel asked STAC to measure the performance of the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) 6.x with the following other stack layers:

• Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Real-Time 10 SP2 update 3 (SLERT)
• HP BladeSystem with HP BL460c Blades
• Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5450 ("Harpertown") CPUs
• HP 4X DDR InfiniBand HCA
• HP DDR InfiniBand switch
• Voltaire Messaging Accelerator (VMA) InfiniBand Software

First, we performed the standard RMDS latency tests. Second, we examined the maximum P2PS Producer 50/50 throughput in a multiplexed configuration.

In this report, we compared the performance of real-time Linux on InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet to the same tests on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 (SLES) on both InfiniBand and GigE.

Some of the key results of the test were:

Lowest mean latency reported to date with RMDS

• Less than 0.67 ms mean latency at up to 750,000 updates per second with SLERT/InfiniBand

Lowest standard deviation of latency reported to date with RMDS

• Less than 0.5 ms through 750,000 updates per second with SLERT/InfiniBand

SLERT reduced maximum latencies at higher rates

• SLERT/InfiniBand reduced maximum latency values at rates over 200kups by 35% compared with SLES/InfiniBand

Highest throughput reported to date in the "Producer 50/50" fanout test for a two socket server

• 10.1 million updates per second achieved with SLERT/InfiniBand

Significant improvement observed in the SLERT/InfiniBand environment compared to a non-real-time OS and GigE

• SLERT/InfiniBand yielded a 61% reduction of mean latency on average compared to SLES/GigE
• SLERT/InfiniBand reduced standard deviation of latency by an average of 33% compared to SLES/GigE
• SLERT/InfiniBand reduced maximum latency values at rates over 200kups by 49% on average compared with SLES/GigE
• SLERT/InfiniBand increased throughput by over 670% compared to SLES/GigE

Separately, STAC has just released test results involving real time Linux technology and a market data workload. Red Hat, IBM and Intel asked STAC to measure the performance of the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) 6.x with the following other stack layers:

• Red Hat Enterprise Real Time MRG
• IBM BladeCenter with HS21 XM Blades
• Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5450 ("Harpertown") CPUs
• 10 Gigabit NICs from Chelsio Communications, without client-side acceleration enabled
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch from Blade Network Technologies

First, we performed the standard RMDS latency tests. Second, we examined the maximum P2PS Producer 50/50 throughput in a multiplexed configuration. We also examined the effects of increasing the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) on total throughput.

To summarize, we found:

Lowest mean latency reported to date with RMDS
Less than 1ms mean latency at up to 700,000 updates per second

Standard deviation of latency remained below 0.5 ms through 600,000 updates per second

In the "Producer 50/50" fanout test of a multiplexed P2PS, total output was:
7.07M updates per second with jumbo frames (MTU = 9000 bytes)
5.56M updates per second with standard frames (MTU = 1500 bytes)