How to Build an Exchange

Stock exchanges routinely process tens of thousands of messages per second, and are designed to process millions in case of high volatility. This isn’t particularly surprising in itself — Google handles approximately this many queries. What’s surprising is that stock exchanges can do this on a single server, whereas Google’s search engine runs on untold fleets of machines around the world.

• Learn about the engineering constraints of building very high throughput systems in resource constrained environments
• Teams draft design proposals for handling specific challenges
• Compete to optimize market components in toy market environments

General topics:

• Throughput
• Reliability
• Privacy
• Fairness
• Auctions
• Implied matching

Rachel Wonnacott has been a trading firm software engineer for five years.