Press: Automated Trader covers TimeKeeper
04/13/2010
“High-speed, fragmented markets and cross-asset trading have together focused the spotlight on latency,” says Bob Giffords, an independent banking and technology analyst based in the UK. “Successful low-latency operations demand an ability to synchronize clocks across server clusters in proximity trading hubs. FSMLabs TimeKeeper appears to have significantly raised the bar, increasing confidence in cross-server software metrics in the low microsecond range. Anyone who is serious about high frequency trading should take note.”
Press Coverage: Securities Industry News
04/12/2010
Securities Industry News April 12 2010
An article by Chris Kentouris covers the release of a new version of FSMLabs TimeKeeper
FSA Fines Three Firms for Poor Transaction Reporting Practices
04/08/2010
An article in Securities Industry News highlights the need for improved audit trails and record keeping in trading systems.
An article in Securities Industry News reports that
The Financial Services Authority has fined Credit Suisse, Getco and Instinet Europe $6.37 million for failing to provide accurate and timely data on transaction reports that could help detect market abuse.
The United Kingdom’s securities regulator said that Credit Suisse would pay $2.7 million; Getco, a privately-held market maker would pay $2.1 million and Instinet Europe, an agency brokerage owned by Nomura Holdings, would pay $1.6 million.Credit Suisse failed to report about 40 million transactions that it executed between November 2007 and November 2008. Of those, 30 million were equity trades executed on the London Stock Exchange.
Getco did not accurately report data for 46.3 million trades, including nearly 32 million trades executed on the LSE.
The charges against Instinet Europe appeared to be narrower: for late reporting and for errors in 22.1 million transactions between April 2007 and June 2009 which included “netting of many trades into a few reports.”
Under the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), buy- and sell-side firms must forward transaction reports on bonds, exchange-listed equities and all derivative transactions to regulators in their home market or elsewhere. Reports must be delivered within one day of the execution of trades. The reports are more detailed versions of typical intraday trade reports.
With trades executing at ever higher peak frequencies, legacy systems need fixes to be able to produce real audit trails. One of the business case motivators behind TimeKeeper is a need to distributed reliable and precise time to all the systems involved in processing transactions.
TimeKeeper article in Dr. Dobbs Journal
04/07/2010
Very few sites that use time synchronization systems have tested them. When asked how they know that the software/hardware is doing what is expected the response is usually “the documentation says so” or the “the software itself reports all is ok”. There are very few tools available to easily test time synchronization or easily reproduced methods for testing and this is a likely cause for this problem.
FSMLabs CTO, Cort Dougan wrote an article about verifying time synchronization that appeared in Dr. Dobbs Journal.
Major TimeKeeper Release April 12 2010
11/11/2009
TimeKeeper 3 Final Release of the NTP replacement
Press release
Technical brief
FSM_Labs_Timekeeper_Datasheet_v7
Please see press releases section for updates since then as FSMLabs rapidly improves precision, resiliency, and feature set of TimeKeeper
FSMLabs TimeKeeper Bolsters High-Frequency Low-latency Trading
And Market Data Streams With Microsecond-Accurate Time
Pure software product provides accuracy to within 10 microseconds across global networks: Fully compatible with legacy infrastructure and client applications
Austin, TX – April 12, 2010 – FSMLabs, the premier provider of enterprise real-time and timekeeping technology, today announced availability of TimeKeeper™, a software product for financial services and other critical applications. FSMLabs Timekeeper helps capital markets and other regulated industries deploy critical applications across clusters, among data centers and over wide-area networks, while meet-ing requirements for accurate time-stamping and data logging for high-frequency and low-latency trading, market data streams and other transactions. TimeKeeper’s precision timekeeping, accurate to 10 micro-seconds or less, adds credibility to trade communications among inter-parties and forms a solid founda-tion for latency measurement.
FSMLabs TimeKeeper assists hedge funds, broker-dealers, proprietary trading firms, banks and other financial institutions meet the challenges presented by today’s marketplace: surging network traffic, in-creasing prevalence of high-frequency trading, and pressure to reduce data latency and transaction times to sub-millisecond levels. TimeKeeper supports mission-critical activities, such as latency arbitrage strat-egies and management of fragmented liquidity environments, enabling granular timestamping to track delivery speed of trade data and response time across execution venues.
“High-speed, fragmented markets and cross-asset trading have together focused the spotlight on laten-cy,” says Bob Giffords, an independent banking and technology analyst based in the UK. “Successful low-latency operations demand an ability to synchronize clocks across server clusters in proximity trading hubs. FSMLabs TimeKeeper appears to have significantly raised the bar, increasing confidence in cross-server software metrics in the low microsecond range. Anyone who is serious about high frequency trad-ing should take note.”
TimeKeeper also helps respond to ever more stringent transaction tracking requirements from regulatory bodies. Failure to conform to reporting requirements from FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authori-ty), SEC Regulation NMS, European Union MiFID and other regulatory mandates can result in US$1 mil-lion or greater fines and impact credibility and institutional trust.
“Synchronize Your Watches” with FSMLabs TimeKeeper
With current timekeeping technology, such as NTP (Network Time Protocol), time servers, blade clocks and application clocks can lose synchronization with reference time, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) time sources. As system clocks lurch erratically to recover, delays and uncertainty are introduced into timestamping of system events. In contrast, FSMLabs TimeKeeper converges with reference time within seconds after system start-up or interruption, serving stable and accurate time to downstream servers and applications.
“Traders, fund managers, bankers and the IT departments that support them often don’t realize the extent of timekeeping inaccuracies in their computer systems and networks,” notes Victor Yodaiken, FSMLabs president and CEO. “With accumulated timekeeping errors that can stretch from milliseconds to seconds and beyond, the integrity of latency measurements, transaction reporting and auditing logs are compro-mised.”
FSM Labs TimeKeeper is an end-to-end, pure software solution that requires no dedicated hardware and exerts virtually no demand on processing resources. Already deployed at multiple financial services companies, the TimeKeeper client-server architecture supports all types of systems that today use NTP.
Availability
TimeKeeper is available today and is optimized for blade servers running Red Hat Linux (RHEL 5.x) with GPS time sources. TimeKeeper can also be bundled with hardware blade servers as a timekeeping ap-pliance. FSMLabs plans to augment TimeKeeper with support for PTP (Precision Time Protocol) later in 2010. Contact FSMLabs for PTP roadmap information.
About FSMLabs
FSMLabs provides high-performance software solutions and technologies to enterprise IT and industrial computing for business-critical, mission-critical applications. FSMLabs Inc has more than 12 years of suc-cess in mission critical software development. FSMLabs software runs advanced industrial robots, soft-ware radios, and factory automation systems worldwide. For more information visit http://www.fsmlabs.com.
TimeKeeper is a trademark of FSMLabs Inc. FSMLabs is a registered trademark of Finite State Machine Labs Inc.
Contacts:
Trish Colby
Linux Pundit
trish@linuxpundit.com
408-828-2861
Kathleen Hawk
Clearview PR
kathleen@clearviewpr.com
847-687-2222
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12/09/2008
Austin TX – December 8, 2008 – FSMLabs®, the enterprise real-time and timekeeping technology innovator, today announced the launch of Timekeeper, a new product for financial services and other business-critical enterprise applications.
FSM Labs Introduces Production Timekeeping for
Financial Services Data Centers
Helps IT Managers Meet Regulatory Requirements and
Stay Competitive Ahead of Flood of Transactions Traffic
Austin TX – December 8, 2008 – FSM Labs, the premier provider of enterprise real-time and timekeeping technology for Linux systems, today announced the launch of Production Timekeeping, a new product for financial services and other business-critical enterprise applications. FSM Labs Production Timekeeping helps IT managers in financial services and other regulated industries deploy critical enterprise applications across clusters, data centers and over wide-area networks, while meeting requirements for accurate time-stamping and data logging for increasing volumes of trades and other transactions.
Enterprise IT managers face multiple converging and difficult to meet requirements: the need to process surging network traffic in capital markets; competitive pressure to reduce trading latency and transaction times to sub-millisecond levels; and ever more stringent transaction logging and tracking requirements from regulatory bodies. In volatile markets, surges in data traffic can overwhelm trading systems capacity, and seriously impact financial applications and recording the data they handle. For example, on the NYSE alone, trading volumes are increasing 20% annually, peaking last quarter at over 110,000 trades/second. Failure to meet these challenges not only makes financial institutions less competitive, it can create losses and liability to clients and put those institutions in the crosshairs of industry and government regulators.
Meeting the Needs of Distributed, Global Markets
FSM Labs divulged that Production Timekeeping has already been deployed by one international hedge fund, and that the company is finding strong interest from a range of data center teams at stock exchanges, fund managers, trading companies and other financial services institutions. “Off-the-shelf Linux and other data center OSes and middleware cannot support the precision timekeeping needed by financial services on single system nodes, let alone for data centers distributed across far-reaching networks,” noted Victor Yodaiken, FSM Labs president and founder. “Time is money – to meet the needs of this dynamic global marketplace, we have introduced Production Timekeeping.”
FSM Labs Production Timekeeping
System time synchronization for accurate, unified transaction logging is too easily taken for granted by both IT teams and applications developers. Transactions once processed on a single server now span clusters of servers and computing clouds extending across continents. FSM Labs Production Timekeeping replaces OS-generated time (based on NTP) with precision distributed timekeeping, locked to accurate reference sources. Rather than “throwing out” industry-standard NTP servers, daemons and client APIs, FSM Labs Production Timekeeping technology addresses NTP shortcomings in-place. Production Timekeeping is completely transparent to existing applications, utilities and time-keeping APIs.
FSM Labs Production Timekeeping supplies systems and applications with a more accurate and higher-resolution time base – accurate to 30 microseconds! Production Timekeeping delivers on the promise of precise time-keeping by
Working at the OS kernel level on both time servers and clients for a system-wide time base
Supporting local precision time sources (GPS PPS inputs, radio clocks, etc.)
Synchronizing time servers and clients at a higher frequency than stock NTP, without additional load or performance impact
Delivering deterministic and accurate timekeeping across local and far-flung networks
Availability
FSM Labs supplies Production Timekeeping as a pre-packaged Production Time Server appliance (blade or stand-alone system), and licenses and installation for Production Timekeeping clients. Production Timekeeping is available immediately for most commercial and many in-house Linux platforms, with easy client installation and set up. Contact FSM Labs for licensing terms and pricing information.
About FSM Labs
FSMLabs provides high-performance software solutions and technologies to enterprise IT and industrial computing for business-critical mission-critical applications.
Founded in 1996, FSMLabs is based in Austin, Texas, with sales, marketing and engineering staff worldwide. In 2007, Wind River Systems acquired FSM embedded software business unit, providing FSM Labs management with new resources to focus exclusively on mission-critical solutions and technologies for enterprise IT.
To learn more about Production Timekeeping and other FSM Labs products, visit http://www.fsmlabs.com, email sales@fsmlabs.com or call +1 718.705.4991.
10/18/2007
Normal business rules apply
Linux is a large scale engineering project financed by profit minded corporations. IBM and Intel, for example, have obtained major returns from extensive and sophisticated investments in Linux. An article on Kernel Trap shows who dominates and steers Linux development and how. Companies that go into Linux under the impression that a “community” of hobbyists exists to do engineering work for free will find themselves in trouble sooner or later. Oddly enough, many companies that spent huge sums on membership fees to industry consortia, have not figured out that Linux and other open source projects are also consortia that operate on similar principles. We’ve been involved in and observing Linux development for a very long time now and it’s possible to play this game for profit, but not without some investment and some awareness.
10/05/2007
High speed/low latency business transactions require complete systems design approaches like that supported in FSMLabs RTMS.
Financial trading applications expose all the weakness of standard “servers”. The cumbersome network stacks that copy every byte of data many times and surround each byte of content with many bytes of overhead data. The rube-goldberg process schedulers. The memory management subsystems, designed on the basis of data from studies of applications used in university computer science departments in the 1970s. The file systems that have inherited block sizes from the PDP/11 era. The increasing speed of hardware, and the decreasing costs of huge memory and storage systems have compensated for flabby systems software for 20 years, but we are reaching a point where power consumption, cost, and exploding non-determinism cannot be cured by hardware alone. FSMLabs multiple kernel approach, which we used to great advantage in the embedded space for over a decade, provides a safe path towards radical improvements in system performance.
The basic idea of the multi-kernel approach is to use standard server system software as a utility that can run under control of a more advanced operating system. The technique we use on current technology hardware, which we sold to WindRiver for the embedded market and we continue to use in Enterprise, virtualizes a small part of the hardware so that the stanrdard OS can be preempted whenever timing critical applications need to run. FSMLabs Real-Time Management System (RTMS) essentially runs as a module on top of a server version of Linux allowing Linux applications and drivers to run unmodified, while preventing them from delaying timing critical applications. The next generation FSMLabs RTMS incorporates a new approach to multi-kernel computing and will be available in Q4 2007 and a following system will appear 2008. But the basic leverage of the multi-kernel approach is that a super high speed, low latency system environment is made available as a module so that investment in existing software is completely preserved even as order of magnitude performance improvements are made easily accessible. Four microsecond worst-case thread scheduling delay, 80 micro-second worst case round trip network packet routing, 1 microsecond worst case timing variation in cluster connected compute nodes - all of these are available now. Innovation has been made more difficult in systems software by success: nobody can afford to abandon hundreds of millions of lines of working software and known interfaces. The multi-kernel paradigm allows us to innovate ruthlessly in the new operating system level, while dragging along all of the standards based advantages of the older technology software.
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07/26/2007
FSMLabs launches its new web site as we exand our Enterprise Real-Time technology.
In February 2007, FSMLabs sold our embedded RTLinux business to Wind River Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:WIND), keeping rights and additional technology for the enterprise real-time business we believe is on the verge of going mainstream. Our market ranges from financial trading systems to visualization and simulation and cluster control. We have new technology for fault-tolerance and security and a host of new partners who will work with us in these areas. In 10 years of working mostly with the embedded industry, we shipped products that brought workstation software into the embedded domain without compromising hard real-time operation. Now we are going to work on the sophisticated system needs of the enterprise where our experience in building systems that cannot be allowed to fail and our innovative real-time virtualization technology brings a host of benefits.
07/25/2007
FSMLabs introduced light-weight virtualization more than a decade ago.
Virtualization is one of the oldest technologies in computer science - in fact it predates the existence of actual computers. For many years, practical virtualization was limited to huge mainframes where the vast overhead of the technology was at least bearable. The “RTLinux method” that FSMLabs introduced in the mid 1990s relied on an observation that we only needed to virtualize a small part of the hardware in order to allow a real-time kernel to operate efficiently on top of a “platform”. We created a fast, resource frugal type of virtualization as an alternative to the traditional lumbering giants. For the embedded world, this meant the rich software environment and low cost commodity hardware of the PC and server market could be used to control machinery. For the enterprise market, the same observation and technology is just as important: because enterprise applications are increasingly cycle intensive and power conscious. As the requirement for real-time become more obvious in todays high speed transaction business environment, the value of lightweight virtualization only increases.