In capital markets, the race for low latency and high performance is relentless. That’s why Google Cloud is partnering with AMD at the premier STAC Summit NYC on Tuesday, October 28th! We’re joining forces to demonstrate how our combined innovations are tackling the most demanding workloads in the financial services industry, from real-time risk analysis to algorithmic trading.
H4D VMs for financial services
At the core of our offerings are the Google Cloud H4D VMs, now in Preview, powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (codenamed Turin).
The financial world operates at lightning speed, where every millisecond counts. The H4D VM series is purpose built to deliver the extreme performance required for high-frequency trading (HFT), backtesting, market risk simulations (e.g. Monte Carlo), and derivatives pricing. With its exceptional speed and efficiency of communication between cores, massive memory capacity, and optimized network throughput, the H4D series is designed to execute complex computations faster, reduce simulation times, and ultimately deliver a competitive edge.
H4D: Superior performance for financial workloads
To quantify the generational performance leap, we commissioned performance testing by AMD. They compared the new H4D VM directly against the previous generation C3D VM (powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors), using the KX Nano open-source benchmark. This benchmark utility is designed to test the raw CPU, memory, and I/O performance of systems running data operations for kdb+ databases. These high-performance, column-based time series databases are widely used by major financial institutions, including investment banks and hedge funds, to handle large volumes of time-series data like stock market trades and quotes.
The results demonstrated a significant, out-of-the-box performance gain for the H4D series. With no additional system tuning, the H4D VM outperformed the C3D VM by an average of ~34% across all KX Nano test scenarios.
Figure 1: Per-core, cache-sensitive operations (Scenario 1) showed H4D’s generational lead with a ~1.36x uplift in performance across all test types, confirming superior speed and efficiency of communication between cores and memory latency for key financial modeling functions. *1
Figure 2: Multi-core scalability with the number of processors set to the max core count and 1 kdb worker per thread (Scenario 2) delivered a ~1.33x performance uplift across all test types, demonstrating H4D’s strong capability for parallel processing across all available cores. *2
Figure 3: For heavy, concurrent multi-threaded workloads with 8 threads per kdb+ instance and 1 thread per core (Scenario 3), H4D sustained substantial leadership, delivering relative gains of ~1.33x uplift across all test types. *3
These benchmark results demonstrate the H4D VMs are built to accelerate your most demanding, low-latency workloads, providing the performance required for high-frequency trading, risk simulations, and quantitative analysis.
A full spectrum of financial services solutions
The H4D VMs will be a major highlight for Google Cloud and AMD at the STAC Summit next Tuesday. Our booths will also showcase our full spectrum of solutions for financial institutions. Stop by to discuss how we can help optimize your entire technology stack, from data storage to advanced computation:
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IBM Symphony GCE and GKE Connectors: Discover how to extend and manage your existing Platform Symphony grid compute environments by bursting jobs to Compute Engine or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
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Managed Lustre: Get extreme performance file storage for your most demanding HPC and quantitative workloads without the operational overhead.
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GPUs and TPUs: Learn how our powerful accelerators can dramatically speed up machine learning, AI, and risk analysis tasks.
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Cluster Director with Managed Slurm: Easily deploy and manage your HPC cluster workloads with our integration for the popular Slurm workload manager.
Come talk to experts!
We know that performance, security, and compliance are non-negotiable in financial services. Our team will be on site to discuss your specific challenges and demonstrate how Google Cloud, in partnership with AMD, provides the robust, high-performance foundation your firm needs to innovate and thrive.
We look forward to connecting with you at the Google Cloud and AMD booths at STAC Summit NYC on October 28th!
