White Papers

In the world of the financial markets, securing an edge over the competition can mean life or death for a trading firm. Whether it is acting on news alerts or price movements, determining the best trading opportunity, or delivering an order to the marketplace, microseconds mean the difference between winning or just playing.

Reducing those microseconds – referred to as latency – is a continuing focus of trading firms, and an increasing challenge as that latency is pushed down to double and single digit microseconds. The “race to zero” becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to engage in as it nears its conclusion.

Free white paper, authored by GE Intelligent Platforms

IP traffic is increasing globally at a breath-taking place. In order to support the demand of high performance IP packet processing particularly for High Frequency Trading applications demanding low latency and higher throughput, users and developers are adopting a novel approach of combining PCI Express packet processing accelerator cards in a standalone network server with efficient TCP/IP stack to create a multi-port compute engine capable of executing high frequency trading algorithms along with regulatory and other necessary functions supporting the HFT server.

In the financial trading markets, the race to zero is on, with participants including competing marketplaces, algorithmic trading operations, high frequency trading firms, market data aggregators and execution network providers all playing their role in pushing down transaction times from hundreds of milliseconds to tens of microseconds.

Linking all of these players together is data itself, binary digits that have real meaning – and often great value – to those that can capture it, understand it, and leverage it. But as the race heats up, market data rates and volumes are exploding, presenting an extreme challenge to all those needing to manage the deluge, and stay ahead in the race.

This white paper was written by Ixia.

Ixia is the Leader in Converged IP Testing and offers solutions for higher speed gigabit Ethernet as well as testing network performance

The importance of minimizing latency in data center networks has been discussed intensely in the last year, mostly with respect to trading in financial markets – where time is literally money. Device and network latency is critically important in data centers of all types. Cloud data centers can benefit significantly from lower-latency devices.