Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: levine_charles@tandem.com (Charles Levine)
Subject: New World Records for TPC-C
Organization: Tandem Computers
Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 12:42:22 GMT

New world record TPC-C results!

In the last two weeks, Tandem has nearly tripled the previous world 
record for TPC-C performance.  On April 25, Tandem announced its first 
TPC-C benchmark result and at the same time set a new world record.  The 
previous record was held by HP on an HP 9000 T500, which achieved 2110 
tpmC with a price/performance of $2115/tpmC.  Tandem's Himalaya K10000 
system achieved 3043 tpmC at $1598/tpmC, or 44% more performance with a 
24% lower price/performance.  

On May 3, Tandem doubled its own record set only the week before by 
demonstrating 6067 tpmC at $1552/tpmC on a 32-cpu Himalaya K10000 
cluster.  The 6067 tmpC result showed outstanding linearity from 16 to 32 
cpus.

For Tandem's 6067 tmpC result, the benchmark configuration consisted of:

    * 32 cpus
    * 4 GB main memory
    * 392 GB disk (196 - 2GB spindles)
    * 40 GB of live database

The leading TPC-C results as of 5/5/94 are:

    Vendor   System                   DBMS          tmpC   $/tmpC
    ------   ----------------------   -----------   ----   ------
1.  Tandem   Himalaya K10000-32       NonStop SQL   6067    1552
2.  Tandem   Himalaya K10000-16       NonStop SQL   3043    1598
3.  HP       HP 9000 T500             Informix      2110    2115
4.  AT&T     NCR 3555/4               Informix      1296     976
5.  Sun      SPARCserver 1000         Informix      1079    1032
6.  IBM      AS/400 9406 F90          OS/400         885    3086
7.  IBM      RS/6000 POWERserver 590  Informix       726    1395


The TPC-C benchmark is widely regarded as the best measure of OLTP 
performance in the industry.  In the words of The Aberdeen Group, an 
independent industry research and consulting organization: "The TPC-C 
benchmark accurately resembles hundreds of customer applications Aberdeen 
has observed over the years.  For that reason, Aberdeen believes TPC-C is 
the best-yet benchmark technology for predicting real-world application 
performance of total systems in most real-world IS production 
environments."  

Unlike TPC-A and TPC-B which exercise only a single, simple transaction 
against a trivial database, TPC-C defines a demanding and real-world 
transaction mix against a complex database.  There are five transactions 
types, which fall roughly into the following categories:

    - New-order: heavy OLTP 
    - Payment: light OLTP 
    - Delivery: deferred execution, pseudo-batch
    - Order-status: light query
    - Stock-level: heavy query

TPC-C also requires transaction aborts, full database transparency for 
all partitioning, and ANSI SQL isolation level 2 (repeatable reads, less 
phantom protection) for all the update transactions.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Charles Levine                      email:  levine_charles@tandem.com |
| Tandem Computers                                                      |
| 19191 Vallco Pkwy, LOC 252-10       phone:  (408) 285-5294            |
| Cupertino, CA  95014                fax:    (408) 285-5245            |
|                                                                       |
| Disclaimer:  I speak for myself.  The opinions expressed here are     |
|              my own, and not necessarily those of my employer; no     |
|              connection should be implied or construed.               |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+