MariaDB Server 10.2 Now Available on Qualcomm Centriq™ 2400 Server Processor

MariaDB Corporation is pleased to announce support for the 64-bit ARM Qualcomm Centriq™ 2400 server processor. The Centriq 2400 brings Qualcomm’s ARM expertise to the data center server world, offering a high core count of 48 per physical CPU chip.

MariaDB 10.2 Server for Centos 7 and Ubuntu 16 is available now.

MariaDB’s architectural support for thread per connection helps MariaDB scale extremely well on the Qualcomm Centric 2400 server processor providing near consistent increase in throughput through the core count.

MariaDB utilizes a custom fork of the widely available sysbench benchmarking utility for performance testing and evaluation. For the benchmarking test we use a data set with 1.2 million rows in either a single table or distributed across 24 tables. Each benchmark thread executes transactions of 1000 SELECT statements, each fetching a single row based on the PRIMARY KEY. Database caches are tuned to be able to hold the data set in memory. Hence the benchmark does not depend on disk speed but tests mostly cpu, memory bandwidth and software scalability (amount of serialized code in the path). My colleague Axel Schwenke ran the benchmark and found some very interesting results. Here we show the results at a system level, the blue bars indicate the test run where data is spread against 24 tables and red is 1 table:

qualcomm_system_benchmark.png
What you see is a near doubling in throughput as more query threads run all the way up to the core count (46 in our pre-production server) and then relatively flat throughput past that as threads increase.

To show the near perfect scaling effect we introduce a throughput per active core metric. This is defined as system throughput by min (thread-count, core-count). When there are fewer threads than cores, some cores will be idle and don’t contribute to the system throughput. But if there are more threads than cores, then some threads must be serialized by the system scheduler and we won’t get any more throughput because all cores are busy anyway. Here are the results:

qualcomm_per_core_benchmark.png
We are very excited to see a CPU that scales out so well combined with very low power / heat consumption making it very well suited for dense deployment in the data center.  We look forward to continue to optimize MariaDB Server for the Qualcomm Centriq ARM64 architecture.