Table of Contents
2 Low-Latency: The Key to SuccessStaying Competitive
3 Supermicro’s 5th generation
Hyper-Speed & Hyper-Turbo
Technologies for Extreme LowLatency Trading

White Paper

New Generation Servers Optimized
for Extreme Low-Latency Trading
Supermicro's 5th Generation Hyper-Speed SuperServers Set World Record Performance Markwith Double-Digit Latency Improvement on Financial Applications

3 Supermicro Hyper-Speed Ultra
SolutionEnterprise-class Quality &Reliability
4 Benchmarks
6 Hyper-Speed Ultra Benefits Review

Super Micro Computer, Inc.
980 Rock Avenue
San Jose, CA 95131 USA
www.supermicro.com- June 2018

Low-Latency: The Key to Success
Recently, the upsurge in low-latency trading has allowed investors to achieve tremendous
profitability by executing trades at blazing-fast speed. With securities transactions
occurring in microseconds and approaching nanoseconds, securities firms whose tradingmachines are capable of rapidly capturing market data and creating orders will prosper,
while slower competitors will fall behind. For this reason, extreme low-latency has become
not only key to building trading infrastructures, but also critical to successful investmentbanking and hedge-fund operations.

Staying Competitive
To stay competitive in the low-latency trading world, securities firms must deploy thefastest and most powerful servers. These servers, collocated in the same premises as
the servers in the securities exchanges, retrieve massive market information from theseexchange servers, analyze it with trading strategies, create orders for execution, and send
them back to the exchange servers (Figure 1).
While achieving low latency is critical, servers must also deliver consistent tradingperformance. Jitter in data transmission can cause orders to lag or algorithms to corrupt,
leading to undesirable results and significant losses at the end of trading. Thus, careful
hardware optimization is necessary to design low-latency, jitter-free servers so securities
firms can gain competitive advantage.

Figure 1.

2

High Performance Trading Network Diagram

New Generation Servers Optimized for Extreme Low-Latency TradingNew Generation Servers Optimized forExtreme Low-Latency Trading

Supermicro’s 5th generation Hyper-Speed & HyperTurbo Technologies for Extreme Low-Latency Trading
Dedicated to serving customers in the financial industry, Supermicro introduces the 5th
generation Hyper-Speed and Hyper-Turbo technologies: proprietary server-board level
optimizations for extreme low-latency trading. These technologies are made possible withthe latest VRMs as well as optimized firmware to focus on flexible tuning.
With Hyper-Speed, the CPUs, memory, and PCI-E cards are pre-accelerated in lockstep
mode for the most reliable performance. Coupled with Hyper-Speed, Hyper-Turbo
allows server system CPUs to maintain maximum Turbo Mode frequency under intense
workloads.

Figure 2.

Figure 2: SuperServer® 1029UX-LL1/2/3-S16

Supermicro Hyper-Speed Ultra Solution
The Hyper-Speed Ultra server system is offered as a total customer solution. It consists ofa SuperServer® 1029UX- LL1/2/3-S16 Ultra 1U rackmount server system, featuring three ofthe latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (Table 1): Gold 6144 processors (TDP 150W) for
the –LL1 offering, Gold 6146 processors (TDP 165W) for the –LL2 offering, and Gold 6154
processors (TDP 200W) for the –LL3 offering.
Furthermore, the server includes 192GB of ECC DDR4-2666MHz RDIMM memory in 12
DIMM slots for the highest bandwidth, 3 PCI- E 3.0 slots that support up to 2 full-height,
full-length cards for the fastest I/O throughput, SAS3 hot-swappable SSDs/HDDs, IPMI
2.0 server management over dedicated LAN with Supermicro’s suite of out-of-band
management software, and redundant 750W Platinum Level (95%+) Digital Switching
high-efficiency power supplies.
Table 1.

CPU Specifications with All Cores Enabled

SKU

-LL1

-LL2

-LL3

CPU6144

6146

6154

Enabled Cores

81218

Turbo Frequency
with Hyper-Speed

4.18GHz4.00 GHz

3.78 GHz

AVX 2.0 TurboFrequency

3.57 GHz

3.36 GHz3.36 GHz

White Paper - June 20183

Table 2.

CPU Specifications with 2 Cores Enabled

SKU-LL1-LL2-LL3

CPU6144

6146

6154

Enabled Cores222

Turbo Frequency
with Hyper-Speed

4.28 GHz

4.28 GHz

3.78 GHz

AVX 2.0 Turbo
Frequency

3.67 GHz

3.67 GHz

3.67 GHzEnterprise-class Quality & Reliability
To enhance the quality and reliability of Hyper-Speed Ultra servers, the processors,
memory, NICs, and serverboard are pre-screened during integration and each system
must pass a rigorous burn-in process. Supermicro pre-accelerates CPUs and memory socustomers can focus their resources on software development and tuning. This service iscomplimented by Supermicro’s warranty terms, available onsite services, and dedicatedtechnical support.

Benchmarks
LINPACK is a benchmark that measures a system’s floating point computing power. WithSkylake CPUs, the new generation Hyper-Speed Ultra servers were able to outperform theprevious generation by approximately 53% with the same number of core count.
Table 3.

Hyper-Speed Ultra Gen-4 LINPACK Results

SKU-LL1-LL2-LL3

CPUE5-2643 v4

E5-2687W v4

E5-2689 v4

GFLOPS

586.461175.21985.53

Table 4.

Hyper-Speed Ultra Gen-5 LINPACK Results

SKU-LL1-LL2-LL3

CPU6144

6146

6154

GFLOPS

1257.121797.562159.27

Sockperf is a network testing tool that measures network latency and network latency
spikes. UDP 64-byte packets were ping-ponged at 600K messages per second between two
Hyper-Speed Ultra –LL1 servers via Mellanox MCX354A. The new Supermicro Hyper-Speed
Ultra server has improved significantly in jitter (difference of median latency and 99.99%latency) reduction by nearly 80% from its previous generation (Figure 3).

4

New Generation Servers Optimized for Extreme Low-Latency TradingNew Generation Servers Optimized forExtreme Low-Latency Trading

Figure 3.

1029UX-LL1-S16 Sockperf Results

STAC-N1 is a benchmark developed by STAC (Securities Technology Analysis Center) thatmeasures the performance of a host network stack using a market data style workload.
This benchmark was performed on a pair of Supermicro SYS-1029UX-LL1-S16 servers, eachwith dual 8-core Intel® Xeon® Scalable 6144 (Gold) processors overclocked to 4.18GHz. Bothservers were also loaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 and Solarflare X2522 Adapters.
Compared to all prior publicly released STAC-N1 results, the bare metal systemdemonstrated the lowest mean latency of 2.3 microseconds at both the base rate (100kmessages per second) and the highest rate tested ever (1 million mps).

Figure 4.

1029UX-LL1-S8 STAC-N1 Results

White Paper - June 20185

Hyper-Speed Ultra Benefits Review

In addition to providing a reliable server solution with the lowest latency, the least jitter,and the best performance, Supermicro continues its mission to help its customers to lowercosts as well as maximize revenues.
The Hyper-Speed Ultra architecture supports the most powerful Xeon 205W CPUs in adense 1U form factor. Hyper-Speed Ultra also houses 2 full-height, full-length cards, 1 lowprofile card, and an integrated SAS3 card. This expandability is further backed by efficient
air-cooling to maintain optimal system performance and stability.
Designed as a turnkey system, the Hyper-Speed Ultra server saves customers time andmanpower needed for integration, tuning, and testing. Supermicro has also pre- qualified
NIC cards and pre-screened components before factory installation. Supermicro’s extensive
system testing and tuning ensure that every Hyper-Speed Ultra will operate flawlessly outof-the-box.
Since securities firms often have limited access to their collocated servers, Supermicro
supports remote management in the Hyper-Speed Ultra servers. Integrated with IPMI 2.0,
the Hyper-Speed Ultra server includes a dedicated IPMI LAN port and a suite of enterpriseclass management utilities: standard features which enable users to control, monitor, andautomate updates to their servers in remote and effortless fashion.
Having access to the most advanced hardware with planned refresh cycles allows securities
firms to outpace their opponents in low-latency trading. As an industry- leading server
supplier, Supermicro is committed to providing the latest technology and will continue tobuild on its reputation with the Hyper-Speed Ultra platform.
For more information, visit www.supermicro/Hyper-Speed

6

New Generation Servers Optimized for Extreme Low-Latency TradingNew Generation Servers Optimized forExtreme Low-Latency TradingThis page is intentionally left blank.

White Paper - June 20187About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro® (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology is a premier provider ofadvanced server Building Block Solutions® for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems
worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green®” initiative and provides customers
with the most energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly solutions available on the market.
Learn more on www.supermicro.com

No part of this document covered by copyright may be reproduced in any form or by any means — graphic, electronic, or mechanical,including photocopying, recording, taping, or storage in an electronic retrieval system — without prior written permission of thecopyright owner.
Supermicro, the Supermicro logo, Building Block Solutions, We Keep IT Green, SuperServer, Twin, BigTwin, TwinPro, TwinPro², SuperDoctor
are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, IntelvPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, Xeon Phi, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation orits subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.
All other brands names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
© Copyright 2018 Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reserved.
Printed in USA

Please Recycle

14_Low-latency-X11_180628_0