Feed Handler Handled Market Data in 400 Nanoseconds in August
September 20, 2011
NovaSparks said its feed handler handled new pieces of market data at an average speed of 400 nanoseconds during the high volatility trading sessions of August.
The supplier of ultra-low latency technology said its feed handler for Nasdaq's TotalView service performed on a 10-gigabit per second basis with an average latency of 400 billionths of a second. The maximum latency was less than 900 nanoseconds or less than a millionth of a second.
During August, peak volumes exceeded 5 million messages a second, according to Exegy, a supplier of ticker plants. In that month, markets swung widely for four days in a row, after a major ratings agency downgraded U.S. debt for the first time.
The NovaSparks Gen2 stand-alone appliance uses field-programmable-gate-array microchips, which allow thousands of pieces of data to be processed at the same time. NovaSparks said that its hardware can handle up to 10 million updates per second.
Its hardware can connect to 21 different algorithmic, market making and order execution servers at the same time. Customers may select specific sets of instruments for each individual output, enabling different servers and or strategies to be serviced concurrently with those instruments only of interest to those servers, while still benefiting from the same sub-microsecond latency capability.
The feed handling stays in the billionths of a second even when bursts of market data emerge in volatile markets, said Yves Charles, Chief Executive Officer of NovaSparks.
NovaSparks' technology is being used by Burstream which says its NanoSpeed Market Data Mesh being installed at the Nasdaq OMX market center in Carteret, N.J. can process a new piece of market data in 600 nanoseconds.
