Millennium Information Technologies (MillenniumIT) unveiled a revolutionary new release of its trading platform this week. It possesses ultra fast order processing capabilities, making it the world's fastest trading platform. During the project, MillenniumIT collaborated with Intel Corporation to achieve a 130 micro second order latency using the Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5500 processors. These tests were conducted at Intel's fasterLAB facility near London UK.
Today, Exchanges must cope with the rapid rise in volumes of high-frequency trading. In the US, trading volumes attributable to high-frequency trading have grown to 73% from 40% a year ago. This means that Exchanges having trading systems with the lowest latency -- the time between when an order is received, processed and an acknowledgement sent -- will retain and grow market share.
Traditional approaches to trading system design cannot deliver the required extreme low latency and high volumes at commercially viable cost points. MillenniumIT's unique rule-based event processing pipeline enabled the system to be deployed and run on inexpensive volume-produced two socket servers, far surpassing the performance of traditional trading systems.
"We registered a 130 micro second order latency in the first benchmark run, and expect this figure to drop by another 40 micro seconds when the final platform specific tuning is done," said Ajit Samaranayake, Chief Scientist at MillenniumIT. The latency measurements were conducted using a day's orders and trading rules from a tier 1 stock exchange.
Nigel Woodward, Global Director Financial Services at Intel, comments, "Working to optimize latency performance in the venue space is a natural extension of our lab-based work to date around sell-side functions," Woodward said "Our engineers worked closely to ensure that the features of the processor could be utilized by Millennium software . The results coming out of this iterative activity prove the importance of this technical collaboration where we have worked with the highly threaded code across multi-core processors to achieve both latency and throughput. We are excited by the prospect of working with Millennium to take this area of the trade life cycle market to a new point in price performance -- contributing to the paradigm shift in the technology strategies that have been deployed in this area to date."
The ability to process 1 million orders/second using volume produced Intel 2 socket Nehalem servers in a full fault tolerant configuration is now a commercial reality at a very affordable price point.
"Low Latency trading systems with latencies in the microseconds will soon become a commodity," says Tony Weeresinghe the CEO of MillenniumIT. The key to success of exchanges in the future are not only faster trading but also having the flexibility to respond to market demand with new order types and products. This, together with a lower operational cost base will help exchanges to stay ahead of their competition. "This is where MillenniumIT differentiates itself. We achieved this low latency with a software-only solution, without hardware acceleration," says Weeresinghe.
With its patented BID tool which facilitates rapid changes to business rules, exchanges can adapt swiftly to changing market conditions. "The goal is to get the latencies under 100 micro seconds," stated Weeresinghe. He also mentioned that Intel and MillenniumIT will keep this low-latency facility available to any exchange or high frequency trading house to perform their benchmarks.
About MillenniumIT MillenniumIT is a premier technology solutions provider serving the global capital markets industry. The Company's products currently powers exchanges, depositories, brokerages and regulatory bodies in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
MillenniumIT supplies, implements and supports a suite of capital market products that include trading platforms, Smart Order Routers (SOR), surveillance, clearing and CSD Products. These products cater to trading multiple asset classes including equities, derivatives, debt, commodities, forex, structured products and exchange-traded funds.
