Solarflare Achieves Record-breaking STAC Benchmarks

Solarflare Communications has announced results of a multi-vendor test using its OpenOnload Application Accelerator middleware, 10GbE dual-port SFP+ SFN5122F server adapters, Cisco Nexus 5010 Switch, Cisco UCS C200 M1 Rack Server and Informatica 29West Latency Busters Messaging (LBM). Solarflare’s OpenOnload Application Accelerator contributed significantly to the difficult task of increasing the application-messaging rate while maintaining low latency and bounded jitter.

The vendors used the STAC-M2 Benchmark to measure the messaging performance of the solution stack. STAC-M2 measures the ability of a solution to handle real time market data in a variety of configurations. The multi-vendor testing achieved mean latencies as low as 14µs with very small standard deviations of the latency (or jitter) of just 1µs. The highest throughput achieved was 2.1 million messages per second. The tests were audited by STAC (The Securities Technology Analysis Center), and the STAC Report is available at www.STACresearch.com/solarflare. The solution stack for this report consisted of products available and shipping to financial firms today.

For this STAC-M2 Benchmark, Solarflare’s server adapters were installed in the servers along with Solarflare’s OpenOnload. OpenOnload speeds up messaging and other types of applications, while reducing the processing work that the host server has to do. OpenOnload thereby simultaneously reduces the application’s latency while increasing its performance, all while maintaining complete compatibility with standard TCP/IP and Ethernet protocols. In this testing, the participating vendors configured the multi-core Cisco UCS servers so that all interrupts and background processing tasks were run on a single core. OpenOnload was used to enable the application threads to run without contention with each other. This left all other cores in the Cisco UCS server completely free to run application code without any interruption, cross talk or congestion. This elegant division of labor among the cores achieved by OpenOnload contributed significantly to the very low latency and very low jitter of the total solution stack.

Solarflare Communications