LRDIMM - Powers up Transaction Processing - Inphi Corporation

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The latest innovation in server memory technology is the Load Reduced DIMM, or LRDIMM. By isolating multiple DRAM ranks behind a single memory buffer, the LRDIMM enables higher capacity and higher speed main memory in high-performance servers, providing a significant increase in online transaction processing benchmark performance. Recently, IBM published TPC-E benchmark results showing a significant performance increase in a server configured with LRDIMM memory compared to a server configured with RDIMM memory. The LRDIMM modules used in the test featured the iMB02- GS02A Isolation Memory Buffer (iMB) from Inphi Corporation. This paper provides an overview of the TPC-E benchmark and its implications to on-line transaction processing (OLTP), a summary of the results achieved by IBM, and a technical explanation of the speed and capacity advantages of LRDIMM. The TPC-E Benchmark TPC Benchmark E (TPC-E) is maintained by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), with results posted publicly on the TPC website at www.tpc.org. The TPC-E benchmark was created in 2007 to emulate the large, complex databases and high online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads a brokerage firm faces in daily operations. Results are independently audited and must be accompanied by a detailed disclosure report for full transparency and accurate comparisons with other published results. The TPC-E benchmark measures system performance on a simplified model of a brokerage firm, measured in transactions per second between customers, the market and the brokerage firm, as shown in Figure 1. Ten different types of transactions are included, resulting in updates and accesses to four different types of databases. Customers initiate transactions to buy or sell securities, research the market, or inquire about their accounts. The brokerage firm executes orders in the market and updates customer accounts. Figure 1 – TPC-E Brokerage Firm Model LRDIMM Powers up Transaction Processing 2
The TPC-E benchmark driver generates the transactions, submits them to the system under test, and measures the rate of transaction completion. The four separate databases for customer, brokerage, market, and dimension data (such as ZIP codes) are scalable to stress high capacity server systems, and created with realistic data based on information from the U.S. Census Bureau and the New York Stock Exchange. For every 1,000 customers modeled there are 685 securities from 500 companies, belonging to 102 industries in 12 different sectors. Customers are separated into three tiers, with each tier having a different average number of accounts and a different average trading frequency. Trades are divided into five different transaction types, including Market-Buy, Market-Sell, Limit-Buy, Limit-Sell and Stop-Loss. The end result is a realistic and scalable benchmark for comparing online transaction processing capabilities of various systems, with results highly dependent on system memory capacity and memory access rates. LRDIMM-enabled systems can improve both memory capacity and access rates, although the IBM TPC-E results quoted here utilize systems with equal DRAM capacities. The improvement in transactions per second (tpsE) achieved here reflects primarily the speed advantage provided by LRDIMM over traditional RDIMM memory. IBM TPC-E Results Summary A summary of the TPC-E results published by IBM is provided in Table 1. The RDIMM-equipped system tested in 2011 achieved a tpsE rating of 1,560.70 transactions per second. The LRDIMM-equipped system tested in 2012 achieved a tpsE rating of 1,863.23 transactions per second, an increase of 19.38 percent, as shown in Figure 2. Both systems were equipped with 512GB of DDR3 DRAM, and the initial database size in each case was at least twelve times larger than the available main memory. While some portion of the performance improvement could be attributed to differences between the servers and CPUs used in each test, for memory-intensive applications such as the TPC-E benchmark the most important factor is memory access speed. With the 16GB DDR3 RDIMM modules, the RDIMM system’s memory bus was limited to 800 MT/s or 1066 MT/s operation. The LRDIMM system utilized 32GB DDR3 LRDIMM modules, capable of running at 1333 MT/s, even at 1.35V. Though not all attributed to the memory subsystem, this increase in operating speed is responsible for improvement in the transactions per second while running the TPC-E benchmark. Table 1: TPC-E Results, LRDIMM based system vs. RDIMM based system Figure 2: tpsE Metric, LRDIMM vs. RDIMM LRDIMM Powers up Transaction Processing 3
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LRDIMM - Powers up Transaction Processing - Inphi Corporation

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