CME Group and Perseus Telecom have launched a High Precision Time service which enables customers to synchronize their time systems across multiple data centers and is available at CME Group’s data center in Aurora, Ill. effective immediately.

“As the speed of trading continues to increase and trade executions are measured in microseconds, the time services used to track and record trading events must become more precise,” said Craig Mohan, managing director, colocation data center services at CME Group. “With microsecond level precision on trade events, a time service needs to have nanosecond level precision, synchronized across all components of the infrastructure, in order to accurately record the time those events take place.”

As CME Groups markets continued to evolve, it wanted to ensure that customers had access to leading-edge services such as the High Precision Time service provided by Perseus Telecom.

“With this product launch, customers can now purchase the High Precision Time service in CME’s Co-Location data center in addition to third party data centers in key financial markets,” said Mohan. “This enables a customer to incorporate the High Precision Time service into their infrastructure in multiple data centers simplifying their infrastructure through a vendor provided solution.”

The service includes access to a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-certified GPS antenna as well as Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Precision Time Protocol (PTP) connectivity with nanosecond accuracy to the Coordinated Universal Time UTC(NIST) timescale.

“The build out of High Precision Time with the CME Co-location Services Group in Aurora was an important undertaking in helping our mutual customers mitigate the risks of poor or out of sync time stamps when disseminating and trading on sensitive market information,” said Andrew Kusminsky, chief operating officer at Perseus Telecom. “We look forward to serving trading firms and vendors such as those within CME Group’s data center which require a high level of responsibility in compliance and high precision trading.”

Mohan added, “Customers can easily and quickly turn up a robust time service that is NIST certified to support their time reporting and compliance requirements. Since this is a managed service provided by Perseus Telecom, customers can now purchase a solution to their time synchronization needs rather than building their own.”

Since the launch of CME Co-Location Services it has provided customers with direct access to GPS antennas at its data center. “We recognized early how important it was to give customers a range of options in how they manage time from within our data center,” Mohan said. “CME worked with Perseus Telecom to integrate the additional time system components into our data center environment to enable the service to achieve NIST certification.”