Intel Benchmark Shows XAP 7 is 300% Faster on Nehalem Processor

GigaSpaces XAP 7.0 running on Intel's Xeon 5500 Nehalem processor, has been shown to be 300% faster than XAP 6.0 on the best previous Intel processor. The benchmark was run by the fasterAPPS program, a joint initiative by Intel, MPI Europe and Globant, aimed at encouraging migration of financial applications to the latest multi-core technology.

XAP 7.0 - Optimized for Multi-Core

GigaSpaces XAP 7.0 has been specifically optimized to take advantage of multi-core environments, allowing highly multithreaded applications to run as efficiently as possible with the least possible resource contention. Specifically, XAP's in-memory transaction and locking mechanisms have been refactored to use more lightweight locking and synchronization constructs supported by modern processors and later versions of the Java virtual machine. This in turn helped us achieve significant performance gains, as shown in this benchmark.

Benchmark Results Summary

GigaSpaces XAP 7.0 was benchmarked on Intel’s latest Xeon 5500 Nehalem processor and achieved the following results:

• 1 million write operations/sec (embedded mode) on one machine - "write operations" are data updates.
• 2.6 million read operations/sec (embedded mode) on one machine - "read operations" are data retrievals.
• 360% boost in write performance and 570% boost in read performance (embedded mode) compared to XAP 6.0 running on the previous best Intel processor, which achieved 276K writes/sec and 453K reads/sec.
• 90K read operations/sec and 40K write operations/sec (remote access) on a partitioned cluster of 3 Nehalem machines, scaling up to 16 threads with near-linear scalability.
• 30% better scalability than XAP 6.0 on the best previous Intel processor.

Note: Running XAP in embedded (local) mode is an order of magnitude faster than accessing it remotely. Users of XAP have the option of running data collocated with business logic (Space-Based Architecture), to enable local access for all transactions, making the high performance figure relevant for most real-life applications.

Benchmark Figures for Embedded (1 machine) vs. Remote Partitioned Cluster (3 machines)

Benchmark Configuration

• The single embedded space scenario was conducted on a single server
• the partitioned remote space scenario was conducted on a cluster of 3 servers

Server Specifications

CPU: Two Nehalem 2.80GHz C0 step processors

Memory: 24GB DDR3 1333MHz memory

Speed Step and Hyper Threading: off

Network interface: Mellanox ConnectX QDR Infiniband, connected to Mellanox switch

Operating System: RHEL 5

Java Version: Sun JVM 1.6.0_12

GigaSpaces Version: XAP Premium 7.0.1 GA (build 3818)