HPCwire: TS-Associates, Voltaire, Accolade Team on Performance Monitoring Solution

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September 22, 2008

TS-Associates, Voltaire, Accolade Team on Performance Monitoring Solution

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Announce "TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition" for performance monitoring of InfiniBand fabrics

LONDON, Sept. 22 -- Trading Systems Associates plc, Voltaire, Ltd. and Accolade Technology Inc. today announce TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition, a new variant of TS-Associates' middleware monitoring product, incorporating software developed by Voltaire and hardware developed by Accolade. TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition has been designed to deliver ultra-low latency and performance monitoring for Wombat Data Fabric systems deployed on InfiniBand, the NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions flagship middleware offering. The solution uses the Voltaire Messaging System (VMS), Voltaire's RDMA based software solution that dramatically improves performance of publisher-subscriber applications running on InfiniBand fabrics.

The Wombat Data Fabric is being adopted by top tier investment banks and automated trading funds that have a requirement for industry leading performance, low latency delivery and highly deterministic operational characteristics. These requirements imply the need for an integrated performance and latency monitoring solution. TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition is the first such solution, born of a partnership between TS-Associates, Voltaire, Accolade and their charter customer -- a major US investment institution.

TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition delivers unique performance and latency monitoring capabilities. On the performance side, it analyzes all messaging traffic in real time, with drill down of overall system aggregate performance by either publisher or subscriber and with traffic rate visibility right down to the individual data flow in terms of messages/second and bytes/second. On the latency side, the product tracks the latency of every unique data flow through the system, aggregating up by publisher and subscriber, thus enabling user drill down from top level system aggregate latency. All latency stats are recorded to TipOff's internal time series database for charting/reporting and for correlation with other metrics required for latency root cause analysis. Latency is measured at the messaging layer to nano second resolution. There is little point in measuring fabric transit latency, because InfiniBand is a deterministic communications medium.

Developed in partnership with Voltaire and Accolade, TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition leverages the latest in InfiniBand RDMA messaging techniques, married with a novel hardware acceleration capability developed for TS-Associates by Accolade. Monitoring of application level messaging performance and latency is delivered through a minimally invasive VMS driver instrumentation technique. Instrumentation meta-data is delivered directly to hardware within TipOff via InfiniBand RDMA operations, where it is immediately time stamped and pre-processed in FPGA firmware, prior to software based analysis by TipOff.

Henry Young, TS-Associates' director of product development, says, "With our existing 1GE and 10GE solutions, our typical approach to middleware analysis and latency monitoring is to capture passively all network traffic, then decode and analyse in real time. However we quickly realised that to apply the same technique to WDF would result in a monitoring solution of similar cost to the system it would be monitoring. Therefore we approached Voltaire with the idea of device driver instrumentation in the VMS layer, combined with a new enabling technology we designed called the 'application tap,' which has been built for us by our hardware partner Accolade. The result is an astonishingly elegant, simple and low cost solution."

Conor Allen, VP Technology at NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions, says, "Wombat Data Fabric, our ultra low latency middleware, presents a challenge to traditional monitoring techniques when running on InfiniBand. TipOff – Wombat Data Fabric Edition provides our customers with key insights into the operation and performance of Wombat Data Fabric in a cost effective manner."

"Comprehensive system monitoring is vital to accelerating the adoption of InfiniBand fabrics in the financial services industry and is a key differentiator for the Wombat Data Fabric in particular," said Amir Prescher, executive vice president of business development, Voltaire. "By working with TS-Associates, who are already firmly established with some of our key customers, we now offer a best of breed solution that combines the performance, efficiency and monitoring capabilities these customers require."

Jon Sreekanth, Accolade's CTO, says, "We have been working closely with TS-Associates to bring to market a new range of FPGA accelerated data processing cards. We quickly identified that Henry's concept of an 'application tap' would have wide ranging uses in software instrumentation. Hardware based time stamping of software metrics, with the only added overhead being a single memory write operation, is as close to non-invasive as it is possible to get. Apart from cost savings, this changes the monitoring metaphor completely. Now users can monitor software events that are important to them, rather than just whatever activity is visible on the wire."

About TS-Associates

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