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ACTIV Financial has launched a software-only implementation of its award-winning ticker plant and content management platform, which capitalizes on advances in CPU technology and kernel-bypass networking to meet or exceed performance previously associated with hardware acceleration. This landmark achievement comes at a time of increased data message rates amid spiraling exchange data costs; and is the latest in a series of technological advances ACTIV Financial has made to address the rapid growth in electronic trading, market volatility, and pace of technological innovation.
“Advances in CPU technology and the widespread adoption of kernel-bypass networking have reduced the need for hardware acceleration. By providing the complete technology stack without specialized hardware reliance, we’re making it easier for the enterprise to keep up with the rapid technological, regulatory and structural changes that we are all experiencing,” said Steve McNeany, CEO of ACTIV Financial.
ACTIV Financial was among the first companies to develop FPGA technology for market data use cases and four generations of its hardware-acceleration product have featured in the ACTIV platform. FPGAs (or Field Programmable Gate Arrays) were used to accelerate a component known as Downstream Content Server (DCS), which acts as a last value cache and streaming calculation engine. Kernel bypass is a networking technology which transmits data from the network straight into application memory space without passing through the operating system kernel, thus reducing processing load and latency.
ACTIV Financial has already begun rolling out the new software-only version, which is fully compatible with previous versions.
