PlasmaENGINE® on PowerEdge R940xa Abstract This whitepaper evaluates the performance and efficiency of running PlasmaENGINE®, a GPU-based real-time stream processing software, on Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa server. The objective of this whitepaper is to look at how the PowerEdge R940xa with its unique architecture is suitable for real-time processing and how customers can implement this solution for real-time streaming.
Revisions Revisions Date Description April 19 Initial release Acknowledgements This paper was produced by the following members of the Dell EMC SIS team and FASTDATA.io: Author: Bhavesh Patel [Dell EMC], Tim Livingston, Amir Szekley [FASTDATA.io] Support: Ritika Saini, April Berman, Ravo, Giacomo [Dell EMC] The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc.
Acknowledgements Table of contents Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................................................2 Executive summary...................................................................................................
Executive summary Executive summary In this age of exponential data growth, organizations that can transform data into real-time insights will have the competitive edge in the market. Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R940xa is tailor-made to accelerate data analytics by deploying GPUs for real-time stream processing for massive data sets. The PowerEdge R940xa’s powerful quad socket design in tandem with associated GPUs is optimized to avoid PCIe bottlenecks to unleash uncompromised performance.
Related resources 1 Overview In order for every industry to take advantage of GPU platforms, an efficient software has to be written for it. FASTDATA.io developed exactly that: an equally performant and efficient software technology to transform data processing from collect > store > process to collect > process > store.
Executive summary 2 Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa server Figure 1: Front and rear views of the PowerEdge R940xa The rapid increase in machine learning and artificial intelligence applications is changing everything about the way enterprise does business. With a powerful 4-socket and highly scalable 4U design, the Dell EMC R940xa Server is a great solution to power real-time GPU-powered stream processing for massive data sets.
Related resources 3 Performance Benchmark PlasmaENGINE® was up and running in minutes on the R940xa thanks to an easy to use Docker image. From there, FASTDATA.io used the Haversine Benchmark -- a SparkSQL query used to calculate and compare distance between two GPS points on Earth -- to test the data processing capabilities of the R940xa.
Executive summary Graph Plot Points: • • • • • • • • Top Left (CPU Average): Average utilization of CPUs during benchmark test. (Note that CPU utilization is much higher on Apache Spark graph) Middle Left (GPU Utilization): Average utilization of GPU, one line per GPU. (Note that on PlasmaENGINE® it's heavily used, whereas on Apache Spark it’s not used at all) Bottom Left (Network Traffic/sec): Network traffic (ignore because the test is local) Top Middle (Memory Available): System memory, not GPU memory.
Related resources • • • Bottom Middle (Network Packets/sec): Network traffic (ignore because the test is local) Top Right (Plasma Engine and Apache Spark Throughput rows/sec): Green line is PlasmaENGINE®. Throughput is the rows/sec processed by PlasmaENGINE® on the R940xa. Bottom Right (Plasma Engine Throughput bytes/sec): Throughput of bytes/sec processed on PlasmaENGINE® on the R940xa.
Executive summary 4 Conclusion By leveraging the powerful capabilities of GPUs, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa allows PlasmaENGINE® to process data with unparalleled performance. The 1:1 CPU to GPU ratio of the PowerEdge R940xa enables Dell EMC powerful server to maximize the performance between CPU and GPU and avoid PCIe bottleneck, which in turn allows PlasmaENGINE® to process a new-record 2.128 billion rows/second. PlasmaENGINE® also processed over 35GB/s of data on the PowerEdge R940xa, or 8.
Related resources A Related resources a) To see a PlasmaENGINE® demo, email sales@fastdata.io or visit https://fastdata.io/. b) To run a Proof of Concept(POC) on PowerEdge R940xa please contact the Customer Solution Centers: internal | external and you can schedule it [HERE].
