National Stock Exchange of India Ltd : Modernization Of Trading Systems

The Problem: In just a span of 4 years, the National Stock Exchange Of India Limited(NSE) has had to deal with the tripling of transactions it has had to handle, from 50 million messages to 150 million messages. The NSE had to design a new system that would be more effective than the current one, made in a new generation programming language, and capable of scaling its capacity to meet the new data demands.

The Solution: A new system was designed that had a set of functionally independent sub systems that could communicate with each other using a messaging framework that is low latency. The new system runs on open-source Linux operating system, is implemented using a modern programming language and can run on commodity hardware instead of mainframes. A modern matching system was rolled out, which acts as the "heart" of the trading platform, implementing business rules and matching orders to each other.

The Result: The new system is handling 7 times the throughput of the old system, and has been able to bring down the latency by 40 times! Also, the new system has moved the NSE out of reliance on legacy infrastructure and propriety operating systems. Since a modern language has been used to implement the system, it is efficient and maintainable.