MST Prioritizes with RTE, SUSE

Boston-based ticker plant vendor Market Systems Technology has extended a partnership with software provider Concurrent to make its ticker plant more efficient.

Under an agreement with Novell, MST will use Concurrent's Real-Time Exten sions (RTE) software, which runs on Novell's SUSE Linux platform, with its ticker plant. MST already uses the Red Hat flavor of Linux to reduce the latency of its products under a previous agreement with Concurrent (IMD, Oct. 24, 2005).

RTE is an "embellishment" of Novell's SUSE platform that improves a product's performance by increasing its level of repeatability-the reliability of an application to perform the same task over and over, says Gary Beerman, director of worldwide marketing at Concurrent. In MST's case, this enables its ticker plant to process a guaranteed amount of data in a certain time period.

One interesting feature is "the ability to… keep certain functions isolated to, for example, one processor on a four-processor machine," says MST president Jack Swan. "That way you know for sure it won't be interrupted by other tasks running on other processors. It gives you control over what your hardware is doing."

"You can pick the most important task and prioritize it… so that nothing else interferes with it," Beerman adds. Users can also set priorities for other processes that may support the key application so that they defer to but don't lose out to the ticker plant, he says.