Specifications

Corporate Headquarters:

Cisco Systems, Inc., 170 West Tasman Drive, San Jose, CA 95134-1706 USA

High Performance Trading/Algo Speed with

Wombat Design and Implementation Guide

Introduction

Automated trading and new regulatory demands are the two main forces behind the changes in Financial

Markets. Firms are trying to maintain their competitive edge by constantly changing their trading

strategies and increasing the speed of trading. New financial products, business models, and trading tools

require a super fast response.

Automated trading is creating a faster trading cycle, in which milliseconds matter. The faster your

trading infrastructure is the better chance you have of hitting your price points in a very dynamic market.

This shift from manual to automated trading is creating a huge strain on the information infrastructure

of financial firms, because it requires both speed and handling huge volumes of data, with maximum

reliability and predictability. The front-office systems of trading departments are the most latency

sensitive and the most visible in the value chain. This is where the automated trading happens and where

Cisco is offering the High Performance Trading (HPT) Algo Speed solution.

HPT Algo Speed solution enables automated trading applications to communicate fast and handle high

volumes of market data in a predictable and reliable manner. For example, to gain a competitive edge in

the marketplace, portfolio and risk managers must be able to access real-time financial information and

use technical indicators to buy and sell equities and exotic investments. As new investment products are

introduced, the need to obtain an accurate view of a fund’s value and its related risk is significantly

increased. These growing business necessities are creating enormous stress on the current compute

infrastructures, where highly computational algorithms in mission-critical applications are unable to

scale effectively.

Cisco is uniquely positioned to address this problem with its high-performance computing solutions,

which include both Ethernet and InfiniBand technologies. Cisco’s broad solution portfolio delivers high

speeds, low latencies, open standards, and high system availability and allows financial customers to

deploy the right infrastructure for their application.

To solve many of the emerging application requirements, Cisco offers InfiniBand and high-density 10

Gigabit Ethernet solutions, which are optimized for the most-demanding financial applications. The

InfiniBand 4X DDR (double data rate) technology in the Server Fabric Switching (SFS) family can

provide throughput rates of up to 20 Gbps. This ultra-low-latency computing fabric provides native

remote direct memory access (RDMA) capabilities, to share computational power across multiple CPUs

and ensure maximum cluster performance. RDMA has the additional benefit of allowing inter- CPU and