Solution Exhibits Under 700 Nanoseconds of Latency for Inter-Process Communication Messaging between Applications
OTTAWA, September 14, 2009 – Solace Systems announced today that its Unified Messaging Platform API can achieve an average latency of less than 700 nanoseconds using a shared memory transport. To demonstrate this performance, tests were run with 100 byte application messages, each sent separately, at one million messages per second on a single multi-core Intel Xeon server.
Trade data from exchanges is at the heart of financial firms’ trading applications. Most applications process the data through a feed handler, then pass it to a messaging infrastructure, which in turn routes it to an algorithmic trading application or human trader. For their most time-sensitive applications, many firms run all of these components on a single machine so data can be shared in memory to eliminate the latency associated with network hops and memory copies. Control of the data is passed between software components using inter-process communications or IPC.
With this development, Solace makes it possible to use the same API that enables high-speed, low-latency communications through a Solace message router to also be used for shared memory IPC communication. Although trading applications aim to capture data and make decisions on a single machine, they inevitably have to execute trades and get confirmations by sending messages to other systems. With Solace, both can now be accomplished through a single API with extremely low latency.
“There are as many different trading system requirements as there are trading strategies, ” said Steve Yatko, chief technology officer of Cresting Wave, formerly managing director and global head of research and development for Credit Suisse. “What they all have in common is the need to maximize performance of the messaging infrastructure and networking protocols, as well as minimize application development time. Solace’s common API allows development to be done just once, whether deployment is across a LAN, a WAN or via an IPC configuration in a co-location facility.”
The shared memory transport is available as part of version 4.5 of Solace’s Unified Messaging Platform API. It will be available in beta in October 2009.