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Check out our Message Medium blog to find out what’s going on in the hardware-accelerated, low-latency messaging world. Silver Bullet for Trading?July 13, 2009 at 10:00 am Interesting discussion thread occurring on LinkedIn regarding Kevin McPartland’s recent Tabb Group Report “Hardware Acceleration: Traders and Teraflops.” I’ve echoed my comment below because it’s worth repeating: effective trades depend on several factors and the proper application of hardware can have a significant impact. Note the use of “proper application” i.e. the right architecture. Here’s the note:
There is no silver bullet for the high-performance financial transactions and order flow. Our market deals with ever-changing feeds, algos, distribution requirements, etc., making it difficult to apply one set of processing logic holistically. Add in bus contention, OS optimization, multiple cores, caching, threading, and network flows/QoS and you have some serious, complex tuning to do. Not an easy task, especially since some may be outside one’s control and operational domain.
ASICs, FPGAs, network processors, GPUs and processors are additional parts of the equation and each one does certain things well. When we designed our message switches, we chose to do incorporate a blend of several of the components listed above, allowing us to deliver optimal performance because each element is doing what it does best. That’s the equation. I still hear many technically astute people say “I’m just going to put it in an FPGA.” Think again – an FPGA is only one variable and you have to solve for several more.
Regards, |
