Specifications

5
High Performance Trading/Algo Speed with Wombat Design and Implementation Guide
OL-15617-01
Introduction
Regulatory changes such as Reg NMS generate more quote, order, and cancel/replace messages as
equity firms adapt to more electronic business processes. The subpenny pricing rule also increases
demands on the supporting infrastructure. MiFID, which goes into effect in Europe next year, is
expected to lead to higher data volumes as well, since investment banks that internalize trades will
be required to publish their pre-trade quotes electronically. An InfiniBand HPC environment
provides a secure, scalable solution to meet the growing needs of the financial services industry.
• Increases competitive edge by incorporating FAST protocol for lowest-latency connections
As financial industry experts predict relentless growth in market-data volumes, organizations are
preparing for implementation of the FAST Protocol. FAST offers a lower-latency feed that uses a
data compression technology. Exchanges are planning to use FAST to deliver new products in areas
such as derivatives and equities. However, to support the new, rapid market data message rates and
deliver the quickest-possible trade execution, a grid computing model is needed to parse the data
from the feeds and then deliver it to consumers. The InfiniBand HPC solution can provide the lowest
latency transport while providing the bandwidth to sustain increased market volumes.
• Provides flexibility to support a service-oriented architecture based on industry-standard protocols
The Cisco HPC solution adheres to industry standard protocols such as Open MPI and Open Fabrics.
This allows customers to leverage the true high-performance, ultra low-latency characteristics of the
InfiniBand fabric. An application environment that supports these industry protocols benefits from
the open architecture, as it becomes part of a service-oriented architecture strategy for the adaptive
enterprise. This shortens the time to market for new financial products, providing a competitive
edge.
• Allows the use of common tools to manage Ethernet and InfiniBand networks
The VFrame management platform enables the delivery of utility computing into the data center
environment. This increases the ability to rapidly provision shared-server and I/O resources on
demand. By managing and orchestrating diverse Ethernet and InfiniBand resources, a financial
organization can become more agile-adapting easily to rapidly changing market conditions. In
addition, just intime provisioning reduces operational costs by automating regular tasks. Since
InfiniBand creates a high-speed fabric that is shared by all the nodes participating in it, downtime
can be quickly averted by reallocating resources to different resource pools.
• Supports the increasing trend toward a utility computing model to support heavy computations
As market-data levels continue to rise and financial organizations look to expand their product
portfolios, increasing raw computational power is required to support the algorithms needed for
portfolio performance analytics, Monte Carlo simulations, value calculations, and risk profiling of
trades. Grid services virtualize computing silos that underperform or are underutilized and makes
them well-balanced, fully optimized enterprise backbones. The Server Fabric HPC infrastructure
can be scaled quickly, because additional computing power can be added to the grid dynamically to
support business processes with increasing demands. The combination of Server Fabric Switching
and VFrame allows for effective consolidation, virtualization, and automation of resources that
deliver instantaneous return on investment.