PARIS -- 6WIND, the industry standard for commercial multicore packet processing software, today announced the availability of a low-latency network layer as part of its 6WINDGate™ software solution. Optimized for high-frequency trading (HFT) applications, 6WINDGate provides low-latency protocols such as TCP Proxy (Termination and Retransmission), IP Forwarding and firewall. Along with 6WINDGate’s high-performance routing capabilities, these enhancements allow HFT Networking Equipment manufacturers to provide solutions without difficult-to-maintain, custom hardware technologies based on FPGAs or ASICs.

On GE’s WANic 56512 IP packet processor board, configured with a 750MHz Cavium OCTEON processor, 6WINDGate provides a latency of below 10 microseconds on the TCP Proxy function, compared to a typical latency in the millisecond range on an off-the-shelf server platform running a standard Linux distribution.

The HFT market involves the use of sophisticated tools for trading securities such as stocks and options. This requires the automated analysis of market parameters to capture trading opportunities that may open up for as little as a fraction of a second. With high-frequency trades executing in microseconds, minimizing the delay between market data analysis and trade submission increases the effectiveness of trading algorithms and maximizes the probability that a trade generated using that data will be executed.

6WIND