Evolution and Practice: Low-latency Distributed Applications in Finance

Abstract

Virtually all systems have some requirements for latency, defined here as the time required for a system to respond to input. Latency requirements appear in problem domains as diverse as aircraft flight controls, voice communications, multiplayer gaming, online advertising, and scientific experiments. Distributed systems present special latency considerations. In recent years the automation of financial trading has driven requirements for distributed systems with challenging latency requirements and global geographic distribution. Automated trading provides a window into the engineering challenges of ever-shrinking latency requirements, which may be useful to software engineers in other fields.