Methods and metrics for fair server assessment under real‐time financial workloads
Giorgis Georgakoudis, Charles J. Gillan, Ahmed Rabee Sayed, Ivor T. A. Spence, Richard Faloon, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2015
Summary We present a rigorous methodology and new metrics for fair comparison of server and microserver platforms. Deploying our methodology and metrics, we compare a microserver with ARM cores against two servers with ×86 cores running the same real‐time financial analytics workload. We define workload‐specific but platform‐independent performance metrics for platform comparison, targeting both datacenter operators and end users. Our methodology establishes that a server based on the Xeon Phi co‐processor delivers the highest performance and energy efficiency. However, by scaling out energy‐efficient microservers, we achieve competitive or better energy efficiency than a power‐equivalent server with two Sandy Bridge sockets, despite the microserver's slower cores. Using a new iso‐QoS metric, we find that the ARM microserver scales enough to meet market throughput demand, that is, a 100% QoS in terms of timely option pricing, with as little as 55% of the energy consumed by the Sandy Bridge server. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.