Intel today announced the opening of a brand new laboratory that will help financial institutions fine tune their trading systems, and ultimately improve business performance.
The laboratory - known as the Intel Low Latency Lab based in Winnersh - will provide an environment for firms to try out a wide range of technologies in a controlled environment before rolling them out internally, helping minimize risk and maximize potential returns from technology investments.
"We recognize the huge leap of faith many financial institutions take when they employ new technologies and that's exactly the reason why we set up this lab to support the financial services community," said Nigel Woodward, Intel's UK director of financial services. "Alongside our partners, we've created an environment where companies can experiment with a wide range of technologies to find a solution that exactly meets their needs. No more guessing and no more risk taking!"
The Lab is equipped with the very latest hardware and software which form the trading solution 'stack'. It also provides a range of performance-oriented software and acceleration technologies - from Intel's own tools and specialist processor cards to compute grids, application servers and high-speed interconnects - that allow testing of a wide range of technology permutations. Companies using the Lab can also take advantage of partner skills in software and hardware engineering skills, as well as architecture, data centre and project management consultancy from Intel's Software Services Group. The result is a highly-tuned solution that is thoroughly tested before it is rolled out to the trading floor
"In Intel's new Lab, we were able to deliver a 50 per cent improvement in FAST encode and decode times on Intel's Core 2 platform. We also saw impressive scalability on our high performance FIX message routing hub, the quad cores allowed us to almost double the throughput at any latency level," said Kevin Houstoun, Director of RapidAddition, one of the first companies to use the Lab facilities.
The Lab has been set up in collaboration with a range of companies that provide technology to the financcial services industry, including BEA, BT Radianz, Cisco, Data Synapse, Endace, Enigmatec, HCL, HP, IBM, Mellanox, Microsoft, Redhat, Reuters and Voltaire.
Paul Kember, HP's Sales Manager for Financial Services UK commented: "HP is delighted to work with Intel on the Low Latency Lab initiative - extending the work we have conducted over recent years on HP blade hardware and Redhat's Linux implementation. We will continue to ensure support for this important new service to the market."
Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products, and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.