Streaming, low-latency communication in on-line trading systems

This paper presents and evaluates the performance of a prototype of an on-line OPRA data feed decoder. Our work demonstrates that, by using best-in-class commodity hardware, algorithmic innovations and careful design, it is possible to obtain the performance of custom-designed hardware solutions. Our prototype system integrates the latest Intel Nehalem processors and Myricom 10 Gigabit Ethernet technologies with an innovative algorithmic design based on the DotStar compilation tool. The resulting system can provide low latency, high bandwidth and the flexibility of commodity components in a single framework, with an end-to-end latency of less then four microseconds and an OPRA feed processing rate of almost 3 million messages per second per core, with a packet payload of only 256 bytes.