Low Latency News

Mark Casey, President of CFN Services,  is a featured speaker at the Datacenter Dynamics Conference, April 21st. The event is taking place in Washington, DC at the Renaissance Hotel.

The session Mark will participate in is entitled, “How Will the Information Superhighway and Data Center Fabric be
Reshaped by New Demands of Content and Data?”

Abstract about the session:

Once ranked 4th in the world by the OECD, the U.S. has fallen to 15th among developed countries in broadband penetration. Initiatives for green infrastructure and smart energy grids are one thing, but they all must be connected – the backbone of the digital recovery is fiber. Over $6.5 billion in funds for broadband expansion will be spent, but that will depend on a new definition of network neutrality from the Federal Communications Commission

* How will grants be channeled to local governments, ISPs and consumers?
* Will neutral network management requirements discourage ISPs from applying for broadband expansion grants?
* Determining the impact of virtualization, cloud computing, and data and content warehousing requirements on advanced automation, analytics and fast reporting
* Maximizing energy efficient performance at the lowest possible price

Switch and Data is now offering the Tabb Group report, Financial Services Data Centers: Power, Proximity and Profit, as a free download from their website.

There was a part of the paper that intrigued me and justified why CFN Services is in the Electronic Trading Space. CFN Services touts the electronic-trading-overview between Chicago and New York/New Jersey trading areas and many European Exchanges. CFN Services also is able to provide custom fiber solutions globally for Trading Firms. Those facts are fairly well known among the Trading firms. But this overlooks one of the greatest strengths of CFN Services, which is the ability to provide route and market intelligence to all of a Firms network. The biggest question many Firms are asking themselves is, “I don’t know what I don’t know, is there something we are overlooking?”. CFN Services, along with their FiberSource® platform, allow a client to really understand all options available to them and to know the exact physical path they currently have. As it states in the quote below, from the Tabb Report, Financial Services Data Centers: Power, Proximity and Profit, getting from point A to B is not a constant in the fiber access business. The latency between carriers can be significantly different and in turn their paths can take circuitous routes that effect overall mileage. Working with a network design and implementation partner such as, CFN Services, allows you not only knowledge of your existing routes, but the ability to effect change to those routes. CFN Services has the ability to work with optimal spans from multiple carriers to provide you the best latency solution you require. Being Carrier Neutral, allows CFN Services the breadth to pull together the solution that best meets your needs depending on your priorities for latency, price and time to implementation.

Page 15 from Tabb Report
“For example, while one carrier might provide a cheap connection to Chicago, a rival may have considerably less costly access to London. Beyond cost, some carriers provide faster access to certain markets. This is not based on the type of cable, as most fiber-optics are created equal, but on the exact path between point A and point B. Data centers are not connected by straight lines of cable, but by a web of fiber that was laid over the past 20 years. Therefore, clarity of the path an electronic order must take to get from the data center in Manhattan to the execution venue in New Jersey is critically important to understanding true latency. “

Wow this is exciting news – what is the fastest Analysis System without backing it with the lowest latency network available. CFN Services is glad to be able to offer the network that is low latency and robust enough to support IBM’s new announcement:

ARMONK, NY–(Marketwire – April 9, 2009) – Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled a revolutionary prototype of the world’s fastest automated options trading system. During the project, scientists at IBM Research collaborated with TD Securities to achieve a 21 times performance improvement on the volume of data consumed by financial trading systems.

Financial services firms must rapidly, capture, process and find value in massive volumes of data in order to maximize client returns and minimize risk. Traditional business intelligence approaches — which rely on capturing, organizing and then querying a fixed snapshot of data — can no longer keep pace.

Through the combination of IBM’s InfoSphere Streams — a breakthrough software technology from IBM Research — and IBM’s Blue Gene/P supercomputer, the IBM Research team created a unique stream processing system ideally suited to meet and surpass the demands of the financial services industry. By enabling rapid, intelligent analysis of live streaming data from a practically unlimited number of sources, IBM delivered astoundingly low latency — the time between when data is received and when it’s acted upon — far surpassing the performance of traditional trading systems.

“In the constantly evolving electronic marketplace, innovative technology solutions to better manage high volumes of real time information are a significant competitive edge,” said Rizwan Khalfan, Chief Information Officer at TD Securities.

According to the Financial Information Forum, the combined options and equities traffic has exploded, doubling in size every year since 2003. The challenge to ingest, analyze and automatically act upon millions of messages every second is the difference between success and failure for automated trading systems. IBM’s use of its unique stream computing architecture and Blue Gene allowed for significant enhancements to real-time messaging and analytical capabilities while offering a simplified, energy-efficient underlying infrastructure.

The collaboration with TD Securities is part of IBM’s First-Of-A-Kind program (FOAK), which engages IBM’s scientists with the company’s clients to explore how emerging technologies could solve real world business problems. In this collaboration, IBM Research scientists worked with TD Securities to create a tailored, unique system through applying advanced and emerging technologies and new approaches.

“TD Securities could potentially use the new system to analyze and act on information before their competitors can finish ingesting and analyzing, effectively blinding the competition to its actions,” said Nagui Halim, chief scientist of the Stream Computing Project at IBM. “We’re not talking about 20 percent faster here. We’re talking about 20 times faster,” he added.

Today’s exchange data rates challenge financial firms trading systems to process up to two million messages per second. The goal of any automated trading systems is to reduce the time between the receipt of market data messages and the decision, achieving a very low latency while processing extreme amounts of data. The more messages a system can process, the more decisions can be made; hence, the more valuable the system.

In testing, the system was found to be capable of handling data at 21 times the speed of Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA), the world’s single largest market data feed, while maintaining ultra low end-to-end latencies.

IBM InfoSphere Streams

The IBM InfoSphere Streams computing platform offers low-latency, high-throughput analytics processing for the continuous streaming of heterogeneous data, and can scale seamlessly from a single server to thousands of general-purpose computational nodes and/or special-purpose computing architectures such as the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The stream processing core continually monitors and adapts to the state and utilization of its computing resources, the information needs expressed by users and the availability of data to meet those needs.

In financial services, where increasingly volatile trading conditions necessitate ever faster decisions, stream computing is a game-changing technology that enables traders to see clearly through a rising storm of data. By enabling financial services firms to absorb and understand vast quantities of live data from almost limitless sources, IBM’s stream software can deliver clear competitive advantage in an increasingly fast-moving and interconnected world. Firms that can derive insight and build new models ahead of the news cycle and faster than the competition will achieve higher margins and faster time-to-market, using their intellectual property to drive competitive differentiation.

BATS Europe Unveils Multicast Data Feed

New messaging middleware from Fiorano has enabled the U.K. fixed-income data provider to accelerate its streaming price updates.
By Penny Crosman
March 26, 2009

LiquidityHub, the London-based liquidity aggregator for the fixed income market, has begun to see a demand for low latency that didn’t exist a few years ago. (Banks send fixed-income derivative prices to LiquidityHub, a 16-bank consortium, and the organization performs calculations on that data and pushes it back out to subscribers.)

Until recently, “the key trading protocol that was used within fixed income was a request for quote mechanism, so if somebody wanted to buy a product, each dealer would give them a price and hold it valid for around 15 seconds,” explains chief technology officer Tony Harrop. “If the market moved in that time, the dealer held the risk in that they had to honor that price.”LiquidityHub Achieves 2 Millisecond Latency

At yesterday’s Wall Street & Technology event, “Accelerating Wall Street,” industry technologists and traders gathered to find out the latest in low-latency trading. Many hedge funds, broker-dealers, exchanges and even some traditional asset management firms were present. All were looking for that nugget of information that would give them just a small edge over their competition.

In the past achieving speed at the millisecond or microsecond level was more important to quant traders and hedge funds. But yesterday’s event made it clear that even traditional asset managers are considering getting into the game. Several were in the audience, intently listening and gathering information.

Will ’Chief Latency Officer’ be the newest title on Wall Street?

CFN Services Offers a Sub 16ms Route Between New York and Chicago

Herndon, VA February 16, 2009 (PRWeb) –CFN Services, a leading network integrator, has announced a new Ultra Low Latency Network from Chicago to New York. This Low Latency Network is in response to the active network traffic for Electronic Trading firms on the Chicago – New York route – allowing traders reliable low latency delivery of market data and order execution to maximize profits and minimize risk.

Low latency delivery of market data remains a strategic capability in the highly competitive post-Crunch trading environment. High-speed data access has shifted fully into the mainstream of market data managers’ activities, it seems, with 72% of respondents to the latest Market Data Insight readers’ poll believing it to be ‘essential’ if their organizations are to compete effectively in 2009.

While 22% of respondents continued to see low latency data as merely ‘nice to have,’ just 6% saw it as unimportant. The results appear to underscore the industry perception that those left standing will require high-speed data if they are to continue in the business of trading.