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Check out our Message Medium blog to find out what’s going on in the hardware-accelerated, low-latency messaging world. I Reckon We Can Wash Away Them Darn OutliersSeptember 25, 2008 at 2:00 pm I really like industry events: the intensity; the competitiveness; the pithy debates; the BS; the incredible concentration of opportunity. The good ones have the pulse and cacophony of a third-world bazaar. The evening parties aren’t too bad either, especially when they’re in New York or Las Vegas.
Fortunately, we had High Performance on Wall Street 2008 in New York this week. It was at the Roosevelt Hotel, La Grande Dame from La Belle Époque. I felt out of place without my frock suit and top hat, but mentally returned to the 21st century and enjoyed the healthy debates on in-line risk calculations, low latency, complex event processing, co-lo architecture, etc.
Candidly, with all the market animation this week, it was tough to gauge what the atmosphere would be going in to the event. With rare exceptions (“Hey, where’s the Lehman dude on the panel?”) things went rather smoothly. Hats off to Pete Harris for keeping things lively and moving.
I very much enjoyed the session “Gaining First Mover Advantage with a Low Latency Market Data Solution.” I skipped the concurrent “Low Latency Market Data Distribution – Software and Hardware Approaches” panel because I work with Barry Thompson and get to eat, drink and debate with him all the time. What struck me about the first panel was a very poignant comment made by an excellent panelist. He commented on the market obsession with low latency and the collective failure to account for devastating effect of outliers – late, non-low-latency information. Algos just don’t like outliers and it screws many of them up. Outliers are low-latency impurity. 99.44% pure is good for Ivory Soap, but it’s not good enough for today’s environments.
This subject deserves much more scrutiny. Outliers undermine low latency. Maybe a debate on this at the Roosevelt next year?
More than the Usual SuspectsSeptember 19, 2008 at 2:00 pm
So, what was the motivation for this panel entitled Ultra-Low Latency Messaging Panel Discussion? Events, messages and low-latency communications are critical components of what we do. Roy commented that events are becoming more widely deployed in diverse business settings. More importantly, those events have increasing time sensitivity. Messaging, of course, is the foundation for event processing now and moving forward.
So, what was my take? Aside from the typical “some speakers were good and some were less so,” one thing was clear: the world of messaging is splitting into software and hardware. To say one is better than the other would be naïve – and we don’t even position ourselves that way. But one thing we do know: when the volumes start getting high, software systems just can’t keep up. (When was the last time you used a software-based LAN switch?) Is this new? No, but with the rise of events and their underlying messages, we’re starting to redline the performance tachometer.
Where is this all going? Just look to the financial services industry; it’s been a rather good harbinger for the broader enterprise.
LSE Outage and Market(s) Volatility – An “Absolute Nightmare”September 8, 2008 at 1:00 pm My phone started ringing early this morning.
“The LSE is down,” said the voice on the line.
Lots of questions around this outage. I’m sure the LSE is not too happy either. From the Wall Street Journal: The connectivity failure by the London Stock Exchange Group PLC, the exchange operator, is an "absolute nightmare," said one trader. "We are just not trading on what should have been a big trading day." Was it an application failure?
We’ll get more information over the coming days, but rest assured we’re seeing the results of building complex trading ecosystems with interdependencies that have their own, often significant risk surface areas. It's not just an LSE issue.
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I had the opportunity to attend a great panel discussion at this week’s 
