Trading today is highly complex, with ever more information available at ever increasing speeds. It is difficult, if not impossible, for individual traders to cope with this information overload without technical support. New systems are needed to gather this data, make sense of it, then act on it automatically. Piranha, from Skyler, is designed to help.
Piranha is a high-volume, ultra-low-latency data streaming platform. It receives data from a range of exchange and vendor data feeds; converts that data into a normalised form and stores it in an in-memory cache; then publishes it in a wide range of formats to external subscribing applications via a range of output handlers.
Piranha is highly modular, and capable of being adapted and configured to a wide range of uses, particularly in conjunction with Skyler Xpresso.
Typical Applications
- High Frequency Trading
- Smart Order Routing
- Central Rates Engine
- Basket Trading
- Rate Contributions
- Risk Management
- Compliance & Surveillance
Product Description
Piranha is a high-volume, low-latency streaming engine. It accepts data from a wide range of market data sources. Piranha normalises and stores that data in an in-memory cache. It then publishes data out to those applications that have subscribed to it.
Piranha has been specifically developed for the financial markets. It comes with an in-built knowledge of different asset classes and their associated attributes. For example, it understands the complexity of aggregated order books across multiple venues and of dynamically created synthetic instruments such as FX cross rates.
Piranha can also be used with Xpresso, Skyler’s fully-configurable calculation engine. This allows proprietary patterns and expressions to be dynamically created, and to refer to any input data that Piranha maintains. Whenever an item of input data changes, any expression or pattern that refers to it is evaluated. The results of that evaluation can, in turn, cause output data or triggers to be published out to other applications or systems in the organisation.
All of this is optimised for maximum performance. At the core of Piranha is an ultra-lowlatency streaming platform. Its architecture can handle millions of incoming data updates per second, normalise it into asset-class-specific caches, drive thousands of Xpresso expressions and calculations, trigger external systems to take action, and publish data to subscribing applications. With a latency of 10-20 microseconds and capacity of over a million updates per second, Piranha is built to perform. Because Piranha is engineered to run on multi- core, multi-CPU machines, it can scale horizontally or vertically, and thus retain its low latency even at very high update rates.
Piranha is a highly agile platform. Its modular architecture allows components such as feed handlers or trading modules to be added or removed via simple configuration. Xpresso allows patterns and expressions to be dynamically created. Together, they permit on-the-fly changes to cope with dramatic market events that are all too common these days.
Piranha can be used to build a wide range of applications. It can be used simply as a platform to turbocharge existing market data infrastructure, or extensively as a fully integrated component of a trading infrastructure. In short, Piranha is the ultimate low latency platform for financial applications.
Smart software for smart trading