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By Tom Groenfeldt
When Intel launches its four-core Nehalem processor in the first quarter of 2010, it will offer the opportunity to build a high-speed transaction system with no network hops. All the processing would be inside a single server with 32 or, later in the year, 64 cores. The company expects it will find immediate application on Wall Street trading floors, in virtualization -- especially for cloud computing -- and for high-speed database use.
In today's financial trading for equities and options, market data feeds with hundreds of thousands of price changes per second come into one server, which sends them to a second server for analytics and a third to take the trading decision and route it to the right venue.
"Typically you would have two sockets in each step and a high-speed network, a gigabyte or 10 gigabyte transport for speed and scalability," said David O'Shea, an Intel relationship manager who works with leading financial firms in New York. "But if you can take those six sockets, two on each of the three levels of architecture, and compress them into one flat architecture, you take out two network latency hops."
Feargal O'Sullivan, managing director for high-performance messaging at NYSE Technologies, explained what this architecture could look like during a presentation at the Intel Developers' Forum. A trading firm could take 12 different market data feeds, pass them to an algorithmic trading engine for analysis, then pass the trade decisions to a gateway and back to the exchange, and do it all on one server.
"This is taking everything that used to run on multiple servers with network interconnects, and the wide range of troubles that come from communicating over a network, and collapsing them into one machine," explained O'Sullivan. "The result is a simplified infrastructure which reduces latency and allows for higher throughput. High-frequency traders can do new advanced algorithms and make better trading decisions."
He expects that trading firms will collapse all of North American equities and options to one server with a latency range of no more than 50 to 100 microseconds.
O'Shea said that the launch of Windows 7, which is designed to support four and more cores on a processor, will encourage more developers to build multi-threaded applications. "Windows 7 has better support than Windows XP, which was built for single core or maybe a little dual core, but it is up to the applications to take advantage of it."
Nehalem by itself will provide a 50 percent to 75 percent performance boost, he added. "There's a tremendous performance benefit from four integrated cores on one piece of silicon. You will always receive the benefits on a trading desk if you have multiple applications running."
Financial firms need the extra power of the new processors to deal with the rising volumes of market data, he added. "Market updates used to be 50,000 per second and now are 150,000 per second, and firms don't know why their PCs are slow. If data rates continue to increase, you will need to ask how many cores you need to process this quantity of market data and where the data rates will be in three years, and then buy for that volume."
He expects a high volume of PC purchases this year. Many financial firms held off their usual upgrade because they didn't want to buy Microsoft's Vista operating system, and then the fall of Lehman led to a freeze on budget, so many are behind their usual refresh cycle.
The Nehalem processor has already found fans in Hollywood. "Nehalem is -- by a substantial margin -- the fastest architecture we have ever used in the render farm," said Derek Chan, head of digital operations at DreamWorks Animation. "It performs well on a per-core basis and the wide-open I/O bandwidth lets us keep all cores busy, much more efficiently than previous architectures."
Intel has also worked with Microsoft to optimize Windows 2008 server for Nehalem, including the expanded version coming out next year with four and eight sockets. With up to 64 cores and 128 threads in a single box, this could replace Sun Sparc and IBM Power in running large applications such as SAP and Oracle.
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