From early 2007, Euronext will offer a cash trading platform capable of handling up to 10 times current volumes at 20 times the speed, early tests of the system have shown.
Euronext and its IT service provider Atos Euronext Market Solutions (AEMS), supported by infrastructure and engineering teams from IBM, carried out performance testing on the planned upgrade of the equities trading platform (NSC Equities), which is scheduled to go live in early 2007 as part of Euronext’s Technological Enhancement Programme.
The upgraded trading platform, which is based on Linux-IBM technology, also meets the highest industry standards in terms of resilience and availability, with a fault-tolerant architecture, redundant processes, and real-time database replication to the disaster recovery site.
Testing, which recreated typical and extraordinary market conditions, produced impressive results. The highlights are:- An average response time of under 5 milliseconds.
- The ability to maintain a sustained workload of 25,000 orders per second, with peaks at 50,000 orders per second lasting 5 minutes and 100,000 orders per second during a 10 second period.
- Over 100 million orders handled and 20 million trades generated in 2 hours.
- 850,000 trades generated on a single financial instrument, with a peak at 10,000 orders per second.
The new platform’s horizontal scalability means that Euronext will be able to continue to process record-breaking trading volumes.
The changes are being made as part of Euronext’s Technological Enhancement Programme and follow the successful technology upgrade of the warrants trading platform (NSC Warrants) to the Linux-IBM architecture in July 2006. In August 2006 Euronext upgraded its existing networks, enabling a 50% performance improvement in data distribution.
The upgrade is designed to ensure that the exchange continues to be able to meet the evolving needs of its customers. Trading strategies and activities have evolved at a very fast pace in recent years. The great variety of instruments and products (blue chips, structured products, trackers) available and the diversity of market contributors and their associated trading activities, ranging from the traditional to the most pioneering (such as algorithmic trading and black box trading), underscore customers' need for speed, flexibility, capacity and reliability.
Michael Towarek of Citadel commented, "We are very pleased to hear that Euronext is investing in its technology in order to support quantitative trading strategies."
Background:- Euronext’s Technological Enhancement Programme is designed to continuously improve IT architecture and trading systems on Euronext. This is being done through state-of-the-art technology, which will increase customer order injection capacities while greatly decreasing order flow network transit time. It covers all the components of the trading chain, from the customer’s access point to the heart of the system, the central trading engine.
While order and trade volumes have continuously increased on Euronext, order-handling capacity has been doubled in 2006 and the NSC order latency for equities has been reduced from 200 milliseconds in 2002 to 90 milliseconds today and will go down to 5 milliseconds next year. - Testing was carried out on an entirely resilient two-tier architecture based on LINUX-AIX/DB2 technology. The platform was designed using high-density IBM System x servers and BladeCenter with high-performance backend DB2 databases configured on highly resilient IBM System p570 servers.
- IBM, System x, BladeCenter, DB2, System p, AIX are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
