NovaSparks has introduced a fourth-generation version of NovaTick that can decrease latency by 20% and process 10-times the number of symbols than its predecessor. The improvements result from the inclusion of Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs in the solution, which will allow banks and trading firms to accelerate their trading platforms without any compromise on scalability or feature set.
Olivier Baetz, chief operating officer at NovaSparks, says: “The platform’s format and API is identical to the last generation, and the way that it is configured and managed is identical to the third generation. We didn’t want to give up on feed coverage and robust features, but we did want to make a hardware upgrade and latency improvement that allows customers to do a lot more with a lot less hardware. The fourth generation is able to serve more use cases and includes a PCIe card, a new form factor that will go directly into the customer’s trading server.”
Luc Burgun, president and CEO at NovaSparks, adds: “The increase in NovaTick’s instrument capacity will enable full coverage of the US cash equity options markets, while its new PCIe form factor will offer a deployment option with a much lower total cost of ownership.”
In contrast to the previous platform, the fourth-generation ticker plant delivers a 20% average latency reduction for US equity markets down to 600 nanoseconds, and a 30% reduction for the CME down to 450 nanoseconds, measured wire-to-wire.
Existing NovaSparks customers will be able to upgrade to the new hardware without any change to the output format, the API, or the management and configuration software. The solution is targeted towards banks, traditional buy-side firms, and trading firms looking for low-latency solutions. The appliance version of the ticker plant is available for evaluation immediately, with the PCIe card due to be available at the end of January 2019.
