A single cloud virtual machine running software from a Bay Area public benefit corporation has set 18 new world records in an industry-standard test of how fast financial firms can crunch tick-by-tick market data. Oxide Computer Company and L Labs PBC say the results, independently audited by the Securities Technology Analysis Center, came from a stack built around the L tick database 1.0 running on one Oxide OxVM cloud virtual machine with 128 vCPUs and 1.25 TiB of RAM.
The audit, detailed by docs.stacresearch.com, confirms the test machine was outfitted with five 3.44 TB Oxide Local NVMe disks. STAC, the organization behind the benchmark, says its STAC-M3 suite functions as a vendor-neutral framework for evaluating the performance, efficiency and scalability of time-series databases used in financial analytics and backtesting, meaning any company's hardware and software stack is judged by the same yardstick regardless of its architecture.
The audited benchmark results showed the Oxide system setting records in 16 of 17 Shasta response-time metrics and two additional Antuco benchmarks, with a maximum speedup of 13.7 times over previous best results.
Two Benchmark Suites, Two Sets of Rules
The audited reports cover two separate testing conditions. As the stacresearch.com report explains, the two reports cover Antuco, the baseline suite for performance under fixed conditions, and Shasta, a suite that permits preloading data into memory and does not require clearing the file-system cache between benchmarks. Per the Eagle-Tribune's account of the seed announcement, the Oxide system ran the entire database preloaded into memory for the Shasta benchmark.
On storage efficiency, the STAC report states the solution achieved the highest published STAC-M3 Antuco storage efficiency at 364%, or 1.86 times the efficiency of the previous best result, SHK211203.
Beating the Field on Specific Market-Data Tasks
L outperformed all publicly disclosed results on the year-high-bid run. The stacresearch.com report adds detail, noting the solution was 1.81 times faster than the prior leader, KDB211210. On a separate benchmark measuring mean response time against systems using the q programming language, stacresearch.com reports the solution achieved the fastest result and was 1.58 times faster than KDB230707.
L was faster than all other publicly disclosed cloud-based deployments in 11 of 17 mean-response-time benchmarks, according to stacresearch.com's detailed material. Separately, stacresearch.com reports the solution delivered a 13.7-times speedup on one volume-curve benchmark versus KDB160425, and a 10.7-times speedup on a volume-weighted average benchmark versus KDB170629.
How It Compares With Past Record-Setters
STAC-M3 records have come from very different hardware setups over the years. Weka's WekaFS, running on HPE Apollo 2000 Gen10 systems, previously set 12 STAC-M3 world records for mean query-response times and five for throughput, according to weka.io. That system spread Kx's kdb+ 3.6 database across 14 HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen 10 servers, with data stored separately on 18 additional HPE servers.
An earlier Axellio system took a different approach entirely, using two compute nodes and 70 dual-ported NVMe SSDs to set five new mean-response-time records in baseline benchmarks and five more in scaling benchmarks, according to docs.stacresearch.com. That same report notes the Axellio solution set mean-response-time records in 11 of 17 baseline benchmarks among publicly reported submissions that underwent both baseline and scaling tests. STAC's organization says it counts more than 500 members from top-tier financial firms and technology companies, underscoring how closely watched these numbers are across the trading industry.
Executives Pitch a Rethought Database
Oxide co-founder and CEO Steve Tuck said deep co-design of hardware and software gives Oxide cloud computers a performance and efficiency advantage, according to the seed announcement. Oxide, founded in 2019 and based in Emeryville, California, describes itself as the creator of the Oxide cloud computer, a rack-scale system combining unified hardware with open-source software, and says the approach lets enterprises retain ownership of their infrastructure.
Jacob Loveless, co-founder of L Labs, said the company had rethought the database to put a faster execution engine directly in traders' hands. Loveless said combining legacy-free, first-principles design leads to a step change in performance and resource reduction, per the announcement. L Labs, a public benefit corporation, says it created L, a runtime for k4, q, Parquet and qSQL.
A Commercial Partnership Follows the Benchmarks
Beyond the audit itself, Oxide Computer and L Labs also announced a partnership aimed at bringing L to trading firms that run tick-data analytics on-premises. The two companies say they will jointly sell and support a customized version of L built for the Oxide cloud computer, with availability beginning the day of the announcement.
STAC benchmarks are designed to let firms reproduce the audited configurations and results themselves rather than take vendor claims at face value, and the full STAC reports are available with free registration through STAC Research. Loveless is scheduled to present the results Oct. 21 at the STAC Summit in New York.
