Exegy's Embedded Edition Targets Low Latency Co-Located Trading Apps

Ticker plant vendor Exegy has released a so-called Embedded Edition of its product, under which a portion of code that would normally run on the ticker plant appliance actually runs on the server hosting the receiver application. The new approach is targeted at ultra low-latency high frequency trading applications, as deployed in co-location environments.

According to Exegy chief scientist and architect Scott Parsons, the Emdedded Edition is a hybrid that offers the "best of both worlds," meaning that it delivers the lowest latency for a specific trading market, while also offering the full capacity and management functionality for the entire market as provided by the ticker plant.

Typically, in a co-location scenario, an installation would have the local direct feed (or feeds) delivered not only into the ticker plant, but also into the server hosting the trading application.  Exegy's feed handler and order book management code runs on that server, and data is accessed via the same application programming interface as is used to interact with the ticker plant, into which feeds from other markets can be fed.  The server-based code and the ticker plant interact to synchronize data - such as order books - across all markets (see example diagram below).

Tests conducted by Exegy suggest that latency can be reduced to less than 10 microseconds for feeds fed directly into the customer's server, compared to around 25 microseconds for data provided via the ticker plant. Parsons says that Exegy has optimised its feed handler and order book code to run on a traditional x86 server, as opposed to the hardware accelerated ticker plant, which incorporates both x86 and FPGA processors.