The ability to manage extreme processing in-memory is a key component of the GigaSpaces XAP solution that Gresham used as a foundation for the transactional control solutions.

This industry-leading, benchmarked performance, equivalent to 1.8 billion transactions per hour, was achieved by running the application in a pure data and compute GigaSpaces grid with no database attached. The achievement, recorded in extensive testing with Intel and GigaSpaces, dwarfs the unprecedented benchmark of 50,000 transactions per second CTC set earlier this year when using a database for reading and writing the data.

"The high performance achieved during this most recent benchmark shows that CTC can be used in extremely high-volume, low-latency environments to give operational certainty to financial organisations and infrastructure providers conducting billions of transactions per hour in fast-moving markets," said Neil Vernon, Development Director, Gresham Computing plc. "CTC's flexibility allows it to be optimised to operate in two modes: pure in-grid (in-memory) matching where CTC is used as a real-time service for the most exacting trading environments; and with a full database attached allowing a throughput of 50,000 transactions per second with all transactions written to the database."

The tests were conducted ion the Intel® Xeon® Processor E7 family, at Intel's Computing lab in Reading, United Kingdom. All tests were executed multiple times to ensure repeatability and to calculate an average result. Gresham used a test data set of 150 million transactions and modelled the data on a two-sided intersystem equity trade reconciliation. The match profile consisted of many-to-many matches, many-to-one matches, one-to-one exceptions and a proportion of the transactions left unmatched as singleton records.

CTC was built using the GigaSpaces XAP elastic application platform as an integral part of its infrastructure. XAP is geared for big data, employing an in-memory data grid for tremendous processing speed, 'share-nothing' partitioning for reliability and consistency, and event-driven architecture that enables real-time processing of massive event streams and unlimited processing scalability. With CTC, organisations can rapidly replace existing manual and semi-automatic internal controls with automated controls, secure in the knowledge that CTC can easily scale to cope with higher volumes in the case of future growth or consolidation.

"The ability to process massive amounts of data in real-time from multiple sources, , while also retaining transactionality, scalability, and high availability is the IT holy grail for many financial services enterprises," said Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces Technologies. "GigaSpaces in-memory technology integrates seamlessly with Big Data products, such as the NoSQL datastores employed by Gresham's CTC, to create a powerful and high-speed platform. The ACID transactions, real-time event processing and elasticity of both processing and data all come at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional approaches. Gresham and GigaSpaces have collaborated for more than five years, staying ahead of the Big Data curve by anticipating market requirements and trends to deliver forward thinking solutions."