10 GbE NIC Adapters— Solarflare

Force10 / Solarflare Applications

Solarflare, the pioneer in high-performance, low-latency 10GbE server networking and application acceleration middleware solutions and Force10 Networks, the leader in high-performance open data center networking recently completed switch to server latency and message rate testing. The test found that the Solarflare SFN5122F server adapter and Solarflare OpenOnload® application acceleration middleware in combination with the Force10 10GbE Switch achieved 5.0 microsecond mean latency over 10GbE in a TCP latency test with 64 byte packet size typical of market data applications. The Force10 switch is one of the lowest latency switches on the market, demonstrating mean latency in this test of 920 nanoseconds. With back to back servers, the server adapter achieved impressive minimum latencies as low at 4.8 microseconds. The latency of the overall system was also very deterministic with 99% of the messages being delivered with a latency of less than 5.5 microseconds. Solarflare and Force10 measured the performance of TCP and UDP messaging using Solarflare developed benchmarks with commercially available products: the Solarflare® SFN5122F 10 Gigabit server adapters and Force10 S4810 10 Gigabit switch. The test platform used servers and processors typically found in use by financial firms today.

The Need for Low Latency in Automated, Real-Time Trading
The rapid expansion of automated and algorithmic trading has increased the critical role of network and server technology in market trading, first in the requirement for low latency and second in the need for high throughput in order to process the high volume of transactions. Given the critical demand for information technology, private and public companies that are active in electronic markets continue to invest in their LAN and WAN networks and in the server infrastructure that carries market data and trading information.

In some trading markets, firms can profit from less than one millisecond of advantage over competitors, which drives them to search for sub-millisecond optimizations in their trading systems. The spread of automated trading across geographies and asset classes, and the resulting imperative to exploit arbitrage opportunities based on latency, has increased the focus on if not created an obsession with latency.

With this combination of forces, technologists, IT and data center managers in the financial services sector are constantly evaluating new technologies that can optimize performance. One layer of the technology stack that receives continuous scrutiny is messaging, i.e., the transmission of information from one process to another, over networks with specialized home-grown or commercial messaging middleware.

The ability to handle predictably the rapid growth of data traffic in the capital markets continues to be a major concern. As markets become more volatile, large volumes of traffic can overwhelm systems, increase latency unpredictably, and throw off application algorithms. Within limits, some algorithmic trading applications are more sensitive to the predictability of latency than they are to the mean latency. Therefore it is very important for the network solution stack to perform not just with low latency but with bounded, predictable latency. Solarflare and Force10 demonstrate in this paper that because of its low and predictable latency, a UDP multicast network built with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) can become the foundation of messaging systems used in the financial markets.

About Solarflare
Solarflare is the pioneer in high-performance, low-latency 10GbE server networking solutions. Our architectural approach combines hardware and software to deliver high-performance server adapter products and application acceleration middleware for superior performance in a wide range of applications including high frequency trading, high performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, storage and virtualized data centers. Our products are used globally by many of the world's largest companies, and are available from leading distributors and value-added resellers. Solarflare is headquartered in Irvine, California with an R&D site in Cambridge, UK.

See the test report for complete details.

 

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