SIA Technology Management Conference
Sell Side Pours Dollars Into Capacity, Connectivity | Market Data Needed--And Faster, Please | Hedge Fund Asset-Class Demands Raise Stakes for Servicers | SIA, BMA Quiet About Merger; Some Open Questions Remain | Matching People and Technology | Elsewhere in Town: Thain, Nazareth at the Big Board's Regulatory Show | Business Is Looking Up, Vendors Act Accordingly | Sybase: Can Breadth Trump Specialization? | Platform's Latest Version Goes Real-Time | Intel: Wanting to Be Noticed--Up to a Point | Smart Searches Find Their Way to Wall Street | Asset Manager Ixis Using Pyxis' mWholesaler | Vendors Combine Real-Time and Historical Analytics | Bracing for MiFID
Vendors Combine Real-Time and Historical Analytics
June 19, 2006
Faster and more flexible processing of analytics using real-time and historical data will be a prevalent feature of the high-speed market data products on display at the Securities Industry Association's Technology Management Conference this week.
StreamBase Systems of Lexington, Mass. is unveiling a three-pronged business strategy called StreamBase Event Persistence. The initiative includes an upgrade of StreamBase's stream processing platform to handle 500,000 messages per second on a single Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processor. Second is Chronicle, an event store that lets traders query both real-time and historical data--the "persistence" of the title. The third part, the StreamSQL language, is a specification for programmers on the platform.
"We are bringing to market an event store that can integrate years of tick data," said William Hobbib, the company's VP of marketing. Chronicle is also designed to work with some IBM Corp. platforms including the DB2 database, WebSphere Web services and MQ Series messaging middleware.
Explaining the value of Chronicle, Hobbib said, "People are asking us to store data but make it easily accessible. You might want to query a year's worth of tick data and see the last time a pattern emerged what happened to the stock. That could be as much as 1 terabyte."
Chronicle speeds up queries by processing the data in virtual memory without going to a storage device, he said. StreamSQL reflects an attempt by the company to reach out to developers in the securities industry.
Los Gatos, Calif.-based Vhayu Technologies said it will add two new features when it launches version 6.0 of its Velocity tick capture and event processing platform on July 1. The system will handle options-related messages and support the 64-bit instruction set of a new processor that Intel Corp. is expected to announce in about a week. This will allow Velocity to exploit 4 terabytes (1,000 billion characters) of addressable memory, as opposed to the 4 gigabytes (1 billion) of 32-bit Itanium and Xeon processors.
"We have designed our software to take
full advantage of this, so there is a noticeable improvement in
performance," said Vhayu CEO Jeffrey Hudson. "Having much more
addressable memory allows you to do many more things."
Hudson noted that equities currently generate 5 to 6 gigabytes of data per day. But for options, the daily total is about 70 gigabytes. The massive increase in addressable memory enabled by 64-bit chips allows for processing analytics and trading strategies in the processor's memory and does not require searching for historical data on network storage devices.
Said Hudson: "If you have to go to disk, that really slows you down. Everything is moving more and more to real time. This is true not just with trading, but with trade cost analysis and compliance. They want to make sure that at the time of the trade that it's compliant."
GemStone Systems of Beaverton, Ore. last week announced its GemFire on Intel for Financial Services data platform, which also uses Intel's 64-bit technology. Bharath Rangarajan, GemStone's director of product marketing, said trading platforms typically must record a transaction log on the database. But in a low-latency world, this slows the trading process considerably. By using the expanded capacity of 64-bit computing, the transaction log can be recorded in virtual memory, and trade executions can be much quicker. "All of these things that were routed to the database can now be recorded in addressable memory," he said.
