DSAL, the leading expert in real-time complex data and event processing, announced today the impressive results of performance testing.
Independent testing achieved 200,000 calculations and 1.5 million updates per second, twice the rate previously achieved in Q2 2006. The tests were carried out on calculations of aggregated values used in algorithmic trading strategies, and were conducted at Intel's recently opened Low Latency Laboratory at Winnersh in Berkshire, England.
The speed and complexity of algorithmic trading coupled with constantly increasing volumes of market data have necessitated the creation of ever more efficient data processing tools. This presents an ongoing challenge to financial institutions where the quantity of data being processed threatens to overwhelm trading applications.
DSAL, together with StreamBase, its partner in providing low-latency, high-throughput solutions based on the StreamBase CEP (Complex Event Processing) engine, provides super-fast processing. DSAL's goal was to benchmark their processing engine in order to verify that it was considerably faster than the industry standard. DSAL was invited by Intel to put its applications through a series of stringent benchmarking and evaluation tests at Intel's Low Latency Lab. DSAL's engineers, working with the Intel engineers, configured and tested a number of performance measurement models, with the performance results surpassing all expectations.
"We are delighted with the results that DSAL have achieved with our Core architecture in our low latency Labs. This underpins the match between Intel processor performance and DSAL's experience in Market Data and Analytics." Said Nigel Woodward Director, Financial Services, Intel Corporation.
Algorithmic trading performance was measured on a typical aggregation calculation over time windows of data. The objective was to establish a level of updates per second that could be sustained over several hours. The testing was conducted with the default server settings for all the components - hardware, operating system, StreamBase CEP engine and the DSAL application. In aa real life trading environment the performance could be significantly improved by optimising the configuration.
Ian Hillier-Brook, managing director at DSAL, commented: "We were delighted when Intel invited us to test at their Low Latency Lab facilities and to carry out benchmark measurements. Doubling the performance in 12 months completely justifies our decision to switch our applications onto the StreamBase CEP engine. We are now planning further testing when we will go beyond the default system configurations and push the throughput rate even higher."