NEW YORK and CHICAGO, June 3, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NovaSparks™, an FPGA market data company, releases audited performance benchmarks that verify the vendor's ability to process market data at deterministic speeds of 1.4 microseconds.
The 1.4 microseconds mean latency rate is maintained when the market data is accelerated 20 times the actual market speed, demonstrating the deterministic nature of the NovaSparks Market Data Matrix©. The test conditions equate to a millisecond peak rate of 18.9 million messages per second.
"Deterministic processing of market data at ultra-low latency rates is a breakthrough for an industry that is constantly re-assessing their ability to trade across all market conditions," states Michal Sanak, CIO at RSJ a.s., a proprietary trading firm that is the largest NYSE Liffe trader.
The accelerated data was replayed from NASDAQ TotalView ITCH 4.1 feed during the Open and Close periods of the day. These periods are considered the most challenging time of day to maintain a full depth of book at deterministic speed.
Conducted by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®), the detailed latency benchmark, called STAC-M1™ is available to the public. "The tests are specified by trading firms and represent challenging scenarios based on their experiences in the real world," stated Peter Lankford, STAC Director. "The tests rigorously measure 'wire-to-memory' latency, leaving nowhere to hide," adds Lankford. The benchmark includes all the tasks to receive, build and maintain a full depth of book starting at the time the first byte of the packet is received by the system. The specification provides a reproducible framework for measuring the performance of traditional software-based solutions as well as pure FPGA solutions like the NovaSparks Market Data Matrix.
"As an industry, we need to cut back on the amount of duplicative testing that takes place and start to share more best practices," states Olivier Baetz, COO of NovaSparks North America. "We believe that full performance transparency will help trading firms determine the business case for deterministic market data processing," concludes Baetz.
NovaSparks offers 27 feeds providing deterministic microsecond speeds for major Equities and Futures exchanges around the world. The Feed Handlers, based on a pure FPGA matrix architecture, include a distribution layer to directly connect up to 21 trading servers without any loss of performance.
The benchmark tests are available from the NovaSparks (www.novasparks.com) and STAC (www.STACresearch.com/novasparks) websites.
NovaSparks, www.novasparks.com, inventor of the FPGA Market Data Matrix™, takes a unique "FPGA-centric" design approach and is dedicated to the Capital Markets sector.
STAC is a technology-research firm that facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, an organization of leading trading organizations and vendors that specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in the financial markets (see www.STACresearch.com/members). The Council is active in an expanding range of low-latency, big compute, and big data workloads.