NASDAQ FOLLOWS CHICAGO TO NT FOR TRADING SYSTEMS.

The Nasdaq Stock Exchange is the latest high profile, high volume customer to bet its business on Windows NT, following a study carried out with Micro Modeling Associates Inc and Unisys Corp. The tests set out to prove that NT Server Enterprise Edition was capable of running a new Surveillance Delivery Real-Time application for the Nasdaq MarketWatch department. The application needs to analyze quote, trade and news transactions at rates of up to 800 transactions a second in order to alert analysts for review. Nasdaq is upgrading its current application to support two billion share days, with the capacity to scale up to four billion share days. Tests were done using data from eight days' worth of actual trading on two Unisys XR/6 servers with 10 processors and 2Gb memory, running in parallel. The software included NT 4.0, Microsoft Message Queue Server 1.0, Transaction Server 2.0 and SQL Server 6.5. Satisfied with the tests, Nasdaq has retained New York-based MMA to begin the technical design phase of the new system, work which is expected to be complete in the year 2000. Unisys already provides Nasdaq with ClearPath servers to handle all its stock quotation transactions. Earlier this year, the Chicago Stock Exchange committed to use NT for its trading, logging and exchange management applications, in what was billed as the first full scale NT installation on a US stock exchange (CI No 3,352).