Sun Microsystems Tuesday said it has broken the million-messages-per-second barrier for the Thomson Reuters Market Data System, a platform widely used by Wall Street financial houses to aggregate data and complete trades.

"We've broken the 1 million messages per second barrier using off-the-shelf Intel-chip hardware and Solaris 10," says Ambreesh Khanna, CTO for Sun's financial services division. "Reuters Markets Data System is widely used to aggregate information, and algorithmic trading is one reason market data has more reason to focus on latency."

Wall Street's financial institutions have become focused on boosting throughput and lowering latency in computer systems  because successful trading is increasingly dependent on it in the competitive atmosphere where the network plays a critical role. Sun competes with its Solaris operating system against Red Hat and Novell's SUSE in this arena, Khanna says.

The Sun benchmark was conducted using Intel-based Sun Fire X4150 servers with dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon X5460 3.16 GHz processors, running Solaris 10 operating system technologies and utilizing a 1G Ethernet network infrastructure. The benchmark was done using the Thomson Reuters standard topology.