TS-Associates Look To Cut (Cycling) Latency in The Alps
Those civic-minded chaps at TS-Associates are participating in The Alpine Challenge in early September – cycling a series of mountain stages in the French Alps – all for the UK Youth charity. The company is fielding a four-person team (though not CEO Henry Young, as he claims he has a bad knee), who will compete...
IBM Grabs Texas Memory Systems
IBM is acquiring Texas Memory Systems, which sells RamSan solid state memory appliances and PCIe cards. Terms were not disclosed, though privately-held TMS has been looking for an acquirer for some months in order to scale its business. IBM is already a reseller of TMS products, though TMS has such relationships with many companies, including...
Cisco Readying New Nexus 3500 Low-Latency Switch
Details are scarce but a mid-September launch for Cisco Systems’ new Nexus 3500 top-of-rack switch is in the cards, a product that will reduce latency significantly compared to its current offerings. Cisco execs aren’t denying the switch is coming, but neither are they spilling the beans. Press coverage suggests the 3500 will have port-to-port latency...
Cloud Platforms Gain Traction in Low-Latency Trading
Cloud platforms – once viewed as suitable only for middle- and back-office operations – are being increasingly adopted to support the front-office. While cloud remains a much overused buzzword, true cloud technologies are now delivering the kind of performance required for low-latency trading, and offer mechanisms to marry business return to technology investment. This topic...
Boston Ships ARM-Based Servers
Server vendor (OK, they sell workstations too) Boston has begun shipping its Viridis server, which leverages low power ARM chips – most popularly found in mobile devices – from Calxeda. The rack mountable 2U server comprises 192 processing cores and is being pitched at high throughput applications, such as big data processing. Each server draws...
Intel, Ion Provide SSD Boost to kdb+
A just published STAC report sponsored by Intel provides insight into performance benchmarks for Kx Systems’ kdb+ database running against an Ion Computer Systems storage appliance containing solid state disk (SSD) technology from Intel. According to the report, several tests that form part of STAC’s M3 benchmark suite – focused on the performance of historical...
Q&A: AMD’s John Fruehe on Standardised Servers for Financial Services
A recent event by the Open Compute Project highlighted work being done to create standard designs for servers. AMD showcased its Roadrunner specification, which is targeted at financial services. IntelligentTradingTechnology.com got the background from John Fruehe, AMD’s director of product marketing for enterprise products. Q: AMD recently announced its open ‘Roadrunner’ specification for servers, specifically...
Q&A: SunGard’s Aditya Yadav on Concurrent Design, and How Stealers Can Help
Most agree that most of the effort to date to reduce the latency of trading systems has been focused on the ‘easy’ areas – lowering propagation latency, speeding up network stacks, using faster processors. The ‘hard’ part – tackling application design – is yet to come, and parallelisation of business logic – aka concurrency –...
Q&A: Ron Huizen of BittWare on Accelerating FPGA Development
BittWare was in the news recently with its FPGA network boards being adopted by Fixnetix for its trading and pre-trade risk offering. As well as providing hardware, BittWare’s also has tools to speed up FPGA development, helping to overcome a much-cited drawback of adopting them. IntelligentTradingTechnology.com talked to the company’s vice president of technology Ron...
Networking Roundup: Emulex, Gnodal, Mellanox
It’s Interop time in Las Vegas this week, so all those involved in the world of networking are making product announcements in between the high-roller parties and playing the casinos. Here are some highlights to prove that not everything that happens in Vegas, stays there. Emulex – In partnership with Myricom, introduced new OneConnect e12000 10gE...