About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Breaking New Ground with Ultra Low Latency Messaging

Subscribe to our newsletter

Inter Thread Communication (ITC) is not a new concept. Developers have been doing it for quite some time. However, doing it fast and well has been tricky. This mimics almost all of the modern day messaging communication primitives, such as IPC and reliable multicast. That is why I believe that ITC is the new ground for ultra low latency messaging.

Pushing the high performance messaging model to its ultimate, present day, conclusion of message passing between threads in a single process is an exciting concept. The same messaging API used as communication between threads within a process, between processes within a box, and between machines separated by an entire planet is a quantum leap in location transparency. The ability that this abstraction allows is quicker time to market for high performance use cases and much more flexibility to messaging users. It simply makes sense for messaging systems to embrace ITC.

ITC is easy to do, but tough to do well. It has its own challenges from an implementation perspective. To do well, it requires intimate knowledge of many low level components, such as CPU caches, cache consistency models, and instruction pipelines. The payoffs are quite impressive.

At Informatica Ultra Messaging, one of our most aggressive customers in the area of high throughput and ultra low latency is LMAX. Martin Thompson, Michael Barker, and others at LMAX have done, what I believe to be, world leading work in pushing the boundaries of how low you can go with latency and how high can you go with throughput in communicating between two threads. In short, 25 million messages/second and 50 nanoseconds latency on modern commodity CPUs.

An even better part is that they and LMAX are extremely open to discussing the approach and the core ideas. The Disruptor code project is more than worth your time.

Ultra Messaging plans to support not only the notion of ITC as a transport, but to adopt the core ideas of the Disruptor pattern in many ways in our products to further provide world class low latency solutions to our customers. Stay tuned for more in this area and more from UM.

See also:

View a replay of a webinar about LMAX.

Martin Fowler has written this great article about LMAX’s architecture.

Here’s a case study on LMAX (PDF).

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: The future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

25 June 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process,...

BLOG

Building an AI Data Strategy: Licensing, Governance, and Usage

AI is often seen as a disruptive force, but it is just as much an evolution as a revolution. Machine learning and automation have long been embedded in financial workflows—the key difference today is the scale and power of AI-driven technologies. As these capabilities expand, how should firms navigate data governance, intellectual property protection, and...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit New York

The AI in Capital Markets Summit will explore current and emerging trends in AI, the potential of Generative AI and LLMs and how AI can be applied for efficiencies and business value across a number of use cases, in the front and back office of financial institutions. The agenda will explore the risks and challenges of adopting AI and the foundational technologies and data management capabilities that underpin successful deployment.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2024 – Twelfth Edition

Welcome to the twelfth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and useful guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change and the data and data management requirements of compliance. The handbook covers regulation in Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This edition of the handbook includes a detailed review of acts, plans and...