In the midst of one of the most stressful days in the history of finance, servers designed to process trading data handled the pressure just fine.
Both the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the
Nasdaq exchange reported that their
servers bore the strain of well over a billion shares traded on
Monday, when Nasdaq dropped 115.83 points and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 554.26 points.
Both exchanges use configurations of servers made by Tandem, a subsidiary of Compaq (CPQ). The NYSE uses a large
configuration of Himalaya K20000s for its equity trading systems.
The NYSE has used the servers since 1981 to bring orders into the system,
match buy and sell orders in real time, and provide posting information
back to the trader.
Nasdaq has used Tandem's Himalaya
K20000 servers since 1983 for its core equity trading operations, as well
as additional servers from Sun
Microsystems and Unisys.
The Tandem servers handle the order execution and trade reporting systems
for Nasdaq, as well as the trade confirmation system.
According to Norm Goldberg, vice president of financial services for
Tandem, the machines ran "just as advertised" on one of the heaviest days
of trading in history. Nasdaq traded over 1.4 billion shares and
the NYSE processed 1.2 billion shares traded.
"The trades were kept running up to date. It was much different from 1987,"
when the servers could not handle the peak in trading, after the market
crashed, Goldberg said.
The only major glitch during the day happened because of shortsighted
programming at Nasdaq. The so-called confirmation computers were instructed
to allow only one million trades per day. As the number of shares traded
creeped upwards of 900,000, programmers took down the system to reconfigure
it.
Nasdaq spokesman Michael Whitehouse pointed out that no transactions were
lost during the time it took to reconfigure, and confirmations were sent
out shortly after the system was back up. The confirmation computers are
now programmed to handle five million trades per day.
Nasdaq previously traded an average of "somewhere around 780,000 trades
per day," said Bill Wlcek, vice president of computer operations for
Nasdaq's Trumbell, Connecticut, facility.
"It was not supposed to go over a billion a shares in 1997," said Wlcek.