ZStack and Kunpeng Achieve Global High Scores in SPEC Cloud IaaS 2018 Benchmark

Recently, the internationally recognized performance evaluation organization SPEC updated the SPEC Cloud IaaS 2018 test results. As the only cloud provider to have received Huawei Kunpeng Validated certification, the test results submitted by ZStack, based on the ZStack Cloud platform and Kunpeng servers, have broken two historical records: with the same hardware scale, performance has improved to 40.5, the highest score globally, and scalability has improved to 93.4%, also the highest score globally!

（https://www.spec.org/cloud_iaas2018/results/cloudiaas2018.html）

This test, based on Kunpeng hardware and taking advantage of the low overhead and high performance characteristics of the ZStack Cloud platform, shows that the SPEC Cloud results not only outperformed other cloud providers on Kunpeng servers by 40% to 382%, but also performed 56% better than other cloud providers using the same scale of X86 servers.

ZStack + Kunpeng Test Scores Display

SPEC Cloud is the first global cloud computing platform benchmark developed by SPEC, designed to address new performance testing requirements in the cloud computing era. It evaluates the performance and elasticity of IaaS platforms across several dimensions, including overall performance, scalability, and instance deployment time. The benchmark uses two tools to simulate IO-intensive and compute-intensive workloads:

• IO-intensive load test – YCSB: This test builds a Cassandra instance to simulate a standard social media NoSQL database application scenario, measuring throughput, database insertions, read response time, and application instance configuration time.
• Compute-intensive load test – KMeans: The test uses the HiBench big data benchmark tool to create multiple instances for K-Means algorithm testing, measuring completion time, Hadoop iteration count for the running instances, and application instance configuration time.

SPEC Cloud provides four key indicators to measure IaaS platform capabilities:

1. Application instance replication count: This indicates the total number of valid application instances completed at the end of the test, including instances for YCSB and KMeans. However, neither of the valid application instances for YCSB or KMeans can exceed 60% of the total count.
2. Performance score: The total score of valid application instances, representing the overall performance of YCSB and KMeans in a cloud environment. The higher the score, the better the performance.
3. Scalability: SPEC Cloud testing involves two stages – baseline data collection and scale-out performance data collection. Scalability is the percentage of performance output that each application instance can provide during scale-out that is equivalent to the baseline stage. A higher result indicates better scalability.
4. Average instance configuration time: The average configuration time for all valid application instances, which is the time interval from when the instance deployment request is submitted until the instance is started and taken over by the test control node.

In IaaS private cloud big data and comprehensive computing scenarios, ZStack, based on the Kunpeng application enablement suite BoostKit’s virtualization acceleration technology, conducted a full-stack optimization, improving overall platform performance by 55.8%, YCSB performance by 46.6%, and KMeans performance by 64.6%.

In the same scenarios, compared to other vendors, ZStack + Kunpeng also delivered excellent results, with overall platform performance improvement ranging from 40.6% to 56.4%, YCSB performance improvement from 38.5% to 83.1%, and KMeans performance improvement from 39.6% to 42.4%.

ZStack + Kunpeng Benchmark Practices

ZStack + Kunpeng’s full-stack optimized cloud platform solution can efficiently accelerate applications such as big data, distributed storage, native applications, high-performance computing, and databases, aiming to meet the diverse computing and green computing needs of data centers.

This solution has already seen successful implementations in government, finance, manufacturing, and other industries. Some notable cases include:

• Financial Industry: In a banking practice, based on Kunpeng-powered ZStack Cloud and other software-hardware environments, a new retail credit bank-enterprise collaboration platform was launched. This system helped build a next-generation business support platform, saving over 30% in IT construction and operational costs, which is an excellent case in the financial sector.
• Smart Manufacturing: In a large industrial internet big data platform project, based on Kunpeng hardware, Tian Gong servers, and ZStack Cloud, the first “5G + Industrial Internet” production line in the industry was established. This significantly increased human efficiency by 65%, driving the implementation of smart manufacturing applications.

Conclusion

This time, ZStack, in collaboration with Kunpeng, achieved the highest global scores in the SPEC Cloud test, demonstrating innovation strength in the cloud computing field and providing solid performance assurance for the deployment of cloud computing. In the future, ZStack will continue to focus on the Kunpeng computing industry ecosystem and further enhance the performance advantages of ZStack Cloud in this software-hardware scenario, ensuring that domestic government and enterprise users can enjoy a cloud computing platform of global leading standards in their digital construction process.