APL2000 announces APL+Win 10

Version 10 provides more speed, support for larger workspaces and larger arrays enabling a whole new level of performance

Rockville, MD – September 13, 2010 --- APLNow LLC announced today the release of APL+WIN Version 10. This latest version of their popular APL+WIN product, an implementation of the APL application programming language product for the Windows platform, offers breakthrough performance improvements through faster overall execution speed, support for larger workspaces and larger arrays. Additional enhancements included in this version enable multi-thread processing, provide an application recovery tool and enhance the error handling and debugging processes.

Highlights of APL+WIN V10 include:
• Scalar and array operations run 30% to 50% faster
• Workspaces as large as 2.6 GB on 32 bit PCs and 3.6 GB on 64-bit PCs
• Support for a 10-fold increase in array size
• New APLSupervisor enabling concurrent execution on multi-core machines
• New and enhanced error handling, debugging facility and control structures

For information: www.apl2000.com
Contact: Sonia Beekman at sales@apl2000.com
Phone: 301-208-7150

STAC releases new market data benchmark with results from Kx and Oracle

The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®) today released STAC-M3TM Benchmark results for a solution from Kx Systems and Oracle Corporation. STAC-M3 provides a common measuring methodology for solutions that manage large timeseries datasets (tick databases). The measurement standard is currently a community proposal developed by the STAC Benchmark Council, comprised of trading organizations and vendors. The Council defines a series of standard benchmarks for capital market workloads, though interestingly only trading organizations - and not vendors - can approve specific tests, which ensures the benchmarks have relevance to real-world trading demands. To complete the inaugural benchmark testing on timeseries data, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) worked with Kx Systems, using Kx’s kdb+. The results have now set the standard for a series of benchmark tests to be carried out over the next few months.

The ability to quickly analyze timeseries of price and trade data is crucial for firms which trade financial instruments such as stocks, currencies, options and other derivatives. The growth of high-frequency trading makes it important for firms to rapidly store, retrieve and analyze massive quantities of data in order to back-test new trading algorithms, monitor their risk, and satisfy regulatory demands. At the same time, surging data volumes brought about by computerized trading make these tasks increasingly challenging in markets which can ‘tick’ (publish changes to prices) millions of times per second.

Peter Lankford, founder & director of STAC, said: "We're pleased that Kx and Oracle have taken the lead in publishing STAC-M3 Benchmarks. This testing responds to a direct need for performance data expressed by some of the world's leading financial institutions. We look forward to further benchmark results from Kx and Oracle, as well as other vendors of software and hardware that can be used for managing large timeseries of data.”

Simon Garland, Kx chief strategist, said: “We have worked closely with STAC and Oracle to create benchmarks. Going forward, the benchmarks will give financial institutions clearly defined criteria for measuring the performance of their systems. When setting up large, critical databases people need to be sure that the configuration they use is delivering the best possible performance within their hardware and software constraints. The problem is nobody has the time and resources to do an in-depth evaluation of all the alternatives and ideally to regularly revisit the chosen solution. These new benchmarks from STAC are valuable components of these decisions."

This series of tests is designed to set a standard for future benchmarks to be carried out by STAC in conjunction with various vendors. The results are vital for financial institutions needing to address their CEP requirements, facing the pressures of constantly increasing data volumes and regulatory demands. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is the first benchmark standard for market data timeseries (tick) databases, allowing vendors to measure their performance and financial institutions to test their own systems.

The STAC-M3 Benchmark standards will accelerate market selection of new technologies by enabling user firms and vendors to measure the performance of their database solutions in a common way. Trading firms will be able to quickly assess the benefit of innovations at all layers of the tick-database ‘stack’ including application software, operating systems, processors, servers, and storage architectures.

Amir Halfon, Oracle’s senior director of financial services technology, added: “Oracle’s unique storage server, the Sun Fire X4540, allowed us to achieve extreme performance with Kx by placing the data as close to the CPUs as possible. The Sun Fire X4540 provides fast, high throughput access between the threads of execution and the storage subsystem, offering up to 96TB of storage in a compact, cost-effective package. The tight integration between compute and storage within the Sun Fire X4540 eliminates the need for an external SAN and provides an ideal platform for high-performance analytics solutions such as Kx kdb+.”

The STAC-verified benchmarks were carried out using Kx kdb+ v2.6 on the Oracle Sun Fire X4540 storage server using version 0.92 of the STAC-M3 Benchmark specifications. STAC-M3 v0.92 has been submitted to the full Council for ratification, and a vote is pending.

The benchmark report is available at www.STACresearch.com/kx.

News from Kx Systems

New kdb+ version
Within the next few weeks, Kx will release v2.7, a significant update to kdb+, which includes file compression. A beta version is already available to licensed users at kxdownloads.com.

Reuters feed handler
Another major enhancement to kdb+ is a new library which enables access to RMDS (Reuters Market Data System) market data, versions 5 and 6. This is for licensed kdb+tick users, and is an almost drop-in replacement for the classical SSL library previously provided by Kx.

Computerworld Honor Award 2010
Kx was nominated as a Laureate by Morgan Stanley, as an innovative technology company. We attended the Medal Ceremony and Gala Awards Dinner in Washington on 7th June. Photos can be seen at the Computerworld Honors Program 2010 website. Read more about it.

Kx customer receptions
We regret that we were forced to cancel the Kx London Customer Reception and Workshop this year due to the volcanic ash clouds. We consider face to face time with you essential, and are planning meetings in London and New York over the next few months. Please contact us if you would like us to visit your firm.

Kx in Asia
In January 2010 we participated in TradeTech China, where Head of Kx Asia, Chris Burke, was one of the technology panelists discussing how to leverage the latest technology solutions and trading platforms to enhance profitability and efficiency.

We will be exhibiting at Trading Architecture Asia, Hong Kong, 1-2 September 2010. Please visit our booth - we look forward to seeing you and your colleagues. Read more.

We are planning a technical meeting in Singapore in the first week of October, with Charlie Skelton, Kx Chief Technology Officer. Please contact us for more details.

Kx in the media
Kx customers rated us highly in Aite Group’s report, “Quant Strategy Development Playgrounds: The High Performance Database Sandbox” Read more. Simon Garland, Kx Chief Strategist, is quoted in Securities Industry News in an article: “Algos Take Hold in Fixed-Income Markets”. We have also received media coverage in Market Data Insight, Asia Etrading, and Bobsguide.com among others.

Updated material on Kx.com
Please see the 2010 versions of the FAQ and White Paper.

For more information about Kx and its products
Email us at info@kx.com with any questions or requests for information.

Direct Development: its time at last?

Public spending in Britain is under harsher and harsher scrutiny. Time at last for lightweight development?

MicroAPL releases APLX 5

MicroAPL announces the commercial release of APLX Version 5 for all platforms – Windows, MacOS and Linux. APLX Server Editions, and 64-bit implementations, are also now available.

You can download free-of-charge evaluation copies of APLX Version 5 from the MicroAPL website www.microapl.co.uk/apl.

This is a quick summary of the new features introduced in Version 5 (see further details):

• Performance Profiling can be used to find out which parts of your APL code take the most time to execute, or are executed most often, and so helps you to determine which functions to concentrate on when optimising performance. You can view the performance data in a number of different ways, and easily 'drill down' to get more detail on exactly where execution time is spent. APLX Version 5 introduces a very easy-to-use menu-based profiling facility, or, for more detailed control, a new system function for profiling. The results are available in tables, in graphical form, and as a detailed web page report.
• Function, Workspace and Text Comparison
• A new Scrapbook and Idiom facility, to help you re-use code snippets and APL idioms.
• ‘Mixins’, an innovative extension to the object-oriented language features introduced in APLX v4. Mixins allow you to extend your user-defined classes so that, at run-time, they dynamically 'mix in' functionality (i.e. methods and properties, and perhaps events) from one or more other classes; these can be internal (user-defined, and written in APL), or external (.Net, Java, Ruby etc, or a built-in APLX system class).
• New external class interface: R Statistical Software. R is an open-source language and set of packages aimed principally at statistical analysis. It includes a huge library of pre-written statistical and mathematical routines, which can be accessed immediately and very conveniently from APLX. It also includes mathematically-oriented graphing facilities, and support for complex numbers.
• New Primitive Functions: Unique, Union, Intersection, Stop, Left, Pass, Right, and Not Match.
• XML Conversion facilities
• Support for SVG Graphics
• Larger component files.

Tom turns round

In a short article in the July/August issue of IEEE Software, Tom DeMarco, one of the founding figures from the 1980s of the software engineering movement, recants.

DeMarco became a major influence on SE with his 1982 book Controlling Software Projects: Management, measurement and estimation.

In my reflective mood I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.

What does he now think?

Software development is and always will be somewhat experimental.

So now even he knows. Direct Development – is its hour come at last?

Award for APL system

Ziggi Paul’s APL system for The Childcare Company has won the Supplier Innovator of the Year award from Nursery Management Today