Latency: The Race to Zero...Are We There Yet?

The presentation titled 'Latency: The Race to Zero...Are We There Yet?' by Amir Langer focuses on the significance of latency in financial trading systems and explores methods to achieve low latency in distributed systems. The talk delves into historical and modern techniques used to reduce latency, emphasizing their application in mission-critical trading systems.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Importance of Low Latency: In the fintech industry, lower latency can directly translate to financial gains by enabling faster transaction execution and better pricing strategies.
• Predictable Latency: Consistency in latency is crucial, as unpredictable delays can impact system recovery and responsiveness, leading to unavailability.
• Historical Context: The talk touches on the evolution of communication systems from the Roman Empire's cursus publicus to the Pony Express and the telegraph, highlighting advancements made to reduce latency in message delivery.

Technical Insights:

• Complexity of Modern Systems: The design of modern processors involves complex caching layers and shared memory, which must be managed effectively to reduce latency.
• Strategies for Low Latency: Techniques such as separation of concerns and asynchronous processing with state machines can optimize message handling and reduce delays in distributed systems.
• Advanced Methodologies: The presentation discusses future-oriented projects like Aeron, which utilize kernel bypass and direct interfacing with network hardware to achieve extremely low latency.

The presentation concludes by highlighting the ongoing race to reduce latency further, leveraging both historical lessons and cutting-edge technology to push the boundaries of what's achievable in system performance.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Low and predictable latency have been an edge in financial trading. Aeron has been pushing the limit on what is possible for IPC, on-premise, and in the cloud messaging. Can we do better? Reaching back into computer science history, techniques like Virtual Synchrony can be used to, not only reduce latency, but also provide high-availability and avoid the complexity of distributed concurrency. In this talk we will explore an approach for system composition that some financial organizations use to give an edge when building mission critical systems.