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StreamBase Systems Inc. has greased the gears of its real-time processing engine, announcing on Monday that its flagship Stream Processing Engine is now 64-bit compatible.
StreamBases product may sound similar to Oracle Corp.s recently acquired TimesTen real-time database, but its competitive edge lies in the fact that its not actually a real-time database.
Rather, the software filters and analyzes data without that data needing to first be entered into a database.
StreamBases platform now supports Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s Opteron chip, in addition to other 64-bit processors, including ones from Intel Corp.
Barry Morris, president and CEO of StreamBase, said the move to 64 bit is meant to satisfy customers unquenchable thirst for low latency and massive storage.
With StreamBases customer set, size matters. So does speed. StreamBase caters to financial services companies, where data growth rates are doubling every year. In addition, such companies need to react instantly to detect mistakes.
“People want to know before a trade goes through that its a noncompliant trade, in a millisecond,” Morris said. “You need millisecond granularity to watch whats going on and instantly raise a flag. Its [all about] risk, prevention of risk, and being able to trade faster than guys down the road.”
Morris cited a recent case wherein a stock trader switched two bits of entry on a screen.
In December, the Tokyo Stock Exchanges computer system failed to cancel the sales order, from Mizuho Securities Co. Ltd., and a intended sale of one share turned into a sale of 610,000 shares for 1 yen. The mistake cost the firm some 40 billion yen, according to the Bangkok Post.
Better access to more data, more quickly, Morris said, makes it easier to correct such profound mistakes. “Sixty-four-bit brings StreamBase that next step to really large data sets and capabilities the largest financial corporations in the world need,” Morris said.
AMD Division Manager for Compute Intensive Solutions Doug OFlaherty said that beyond financial services firms, anybody whos working with large data sets, doing transactional analysis that has to happen with very low latency, is a good fit for AMDs direct-connect 64-bit architecture.
AMDs 64-bit processor technology supports those functions with architecture that puts a memory controller on each socket.
The chips have a direct-connect architecture, which sets up a separate path for chip-to-chip communication and a separate path for data input/output.
The separate path for memory matters because, OFlaherty said, “Were in an age with chip speeds and the ability to crank numbers very fast. Weve gone from megahertz to gigahertz. Weve got a lot of processing power.”