IBM unveils prototype of fast automated options trading system.

CORPORATE IT UPDATE-(C)1995-2009 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Information technology company IBM (NYSE:IBM) has unveiled a prototype of the world's fastest automated options trading system.

During the project, scientists at IBM Research collaborated with TD Securities, a provider of

According to the company, through the combination of IBM's InfoSphere Streams, a software technology from IBM Research, and the company's Blue Gene/P supercomputer, the IBM Research team created a stream processing system suited to meet and surpass the demands of the financial services industry. By enabling rapid, intelligent analysis of live streaming data from a practically unlimited number of sources, the company delivered very low latency, surpassing the performance of traditional trading systems.

The InfoSphere Streams computing platform offers low-latency, high-throughput analytics processing for the continuous streaming of heterogeneous data and can scale from a single server to thousands of general-purpose computational nodes and/or special-purpose computing architectures such as the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The stream processing core monitors and adapts to the state and utilisation of its computing resources, the information needs expressed by users and the availability of data to meet those needs.

The collaboration with TD Securities is part of the company's First-Of-A-Kind program (FOAK), which engages IBM's scientists with its clients to explore how emerging technologies could solve real world business problems. In this collaboration, IBM Research scientists worked with TD Securities to create a tailored system through applying advanced and emerging technologies and new approaches, the company said.

Today's exchange data rates challenge financial firms trading systems to process up to 2m messages per second. The goal of an automated trading system is to reduce the time between the receipt of market data messages and the decision, achieving a very low latency while processing large amounts of data.

No financial details were disclosed.

((Comments on this story may be sent to info@m2.com))