Azul Systems has released version 5.0 of its Zing realtime Java Virtual Machine for Linux, eliminating the need for a hypervisor layer, and thus making it more attractive to developers of low-latency trading applications. In earlier versions, the required hypervisor virtualisation added unwelcome latency.
Zing is 100% Java-standard JVM, which is based on Oracle’s HotSpot realtime JVM, designed for applications that need to support high transaction rates and large memory, with consistent processing times.
Zing uses the Azul C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector), which eliminates garbage collection pauses – a prime cause of inconsistency of processing time. This inconsistency – known as jitter – needs to be minimised for many algorithmic and high frequency trading strategies to work. Zing requires no application code changes, and is tuned via a few parameters. Zing 5.0 currently supports Red Hat Linux 6, and CentOS 6.
Azul began life making custom multi-core appliances for high performance Java applicatons. While it still does that, it now also offers the Zing JVM for commodity x86 servers.
