CME Boosts Globex’s Capacity for CBOT Products and Speeds Up Data

Associated Feature:CME Group Migrates Combined CME-CBOT Electronic Trading to a Single Platform

CME is scaling Globex, its electronic trading platform, to handle CBOT products by adding more hardware for order entry, matching engines and market data. "The Board of Trade products will be running on their own matching engines" for different products, explains Kevin Kometer, deputy CIO at CME Group. For example, CBOT agricultural products will run on one engine and the financial products will run on another engine.

To handle increasing market data volumes, CME will create separate market data channels for each product group. "We might have a channel for equity futures and equity options, and we might have a channel for Board of Trade options," says Kometer. "This allows the customer to choose what they listen to instead of taking in a whole suite of products." According to Kometer, CME might add an agricultural futures channel, a financial futures channel and a channel for options.

As an early adopter of the FAST Protocol, CME also has an initiative underway to speed up market data. CME has changed its legacy format for market data to the FIX Protocol and will use the new compression algorithm FAST (FIX Adopted for Streaming) for all market data, including for CBOT products, relates Kometer. By moving over to FIX FAST, customers' bandwidth requirements will be reduced by more than 50 percent, he contends. "We end up batching messages together with a higher level of compression," Kometer says. "Therefore, we're able to deliver a larger payload across the network at a more efficient bandwidth." he says.

While customers currently are not required to move over to FAST, Kometer notes, CME will discontinue the legacy market data format by the end of 2008.