Big Developments in the Race Toward High-Performance Trading Nirvana

By: fosullivan

File Under: NYSE Technologies

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From Feargal O'Sullivan, Managing Director, High Performance Messaging at NYSE Technologies:

We at NYSE Technologies have long been proud of our status in the industry as the leading provider of infrastructure for low-latency trading, and this is backed up by our latest news. Last week at the Intel Developer's Forum 2009 in San Francisco, we demonstrated a complete, North American Equities and Options trading system in a single box -- in a brand-spanking new, Intel Nehalem 32-core box to be exact.

Toward the end of August, our partners at Intel provided us with a quad-socket server filled with eight-core CPUs. It was an alpha version of the new Nehalem chips and we are one of the very few companies they feel can push a server like this to the limit... and boy, did we! We ran four of our ultra-low-latency Market Data Platform V5 feed handlers, eight of our Universal feed handlers, a mock Smart Order Router and two of our Market Access Gateways, all linked by NYSE Technologies Data Fabric messaging using its Local Direct Memory Access (LDMA) transport. We pushed raw market data over 2GigE cross-over cables to the 32-core sever but only used 24 of those cores to process the feeds, make trading decisions, and send the orders to the (mock) market.

That's a complete trading system in a box -- running on a standards-based platform with the flexibility and speed of software development to allow for rapid changes and broad developer support. So, go and check out the demo for yourselves; it's embedded above and also currently available on the Intel Channel of YouTube.

Note that while the performance was intentionally limited, due to the alpha status of the 8-core CPUs, we are expecting a beta version of the server this week which should be much closer to production release speed. We are going to rebuild the demo on that server so we can show it again at the FIA Options Conference in Chicago on October 20-22.

Come and see us if you're attending and get ready for a revolution in high-performance trading.

Sincerely,
Feargal

P.S. I'll post again later this week with details of the RDMA pub/sub demo we also showed at IDF2009.