# Exec Sum # Thanks and acknowledgements # Introduction # Subject The first description of my internship project was given to me as: > The project is about benchmarking a new service we're building related to > exchange connectivity. It would involve writing a program to generate load on > the new service, preparing a test environment and analyzing the performance > results. Time permitting might also involve making performance improvements to > the services. To understand this subject, we must start with an explanation of what exchange connectivity means at IMC: it is the layer in IMC's architecture that ensures the connection between internal trading services and external exchanges' own infrastructure and services. It is at this layer that exchange-specific protocols are normalised into IMC's own protocol messages, and vice versa. Here is the list of tasks that I am expected to have accomplished during this internship: * become familiar with the service, * write a dummy load generator, * benchmark the system under the load, * analyze the measurements. This kind of project is exactly the reason that I was interested in working in finance and trading. It is a field that is focused on achieving the highest performance possible, because being faster is directly tied with making more trades and results in more profits. Because I expressed this personal interest for working on high performance systems and related subjects, I was given this internship project to work on. # Context of the subject # Internship roadmap # Engineering practices # Illustrated analysis of acquired skills # Added value # Conclusion # Annex ## About IMC ## Results & Comments