[j-nsp] Qfabric

[Brant I. Stevens]

On 2/27/11 11:55 AM, "Keegan Holley" <keegan.holley at sungard.com> wrote:

>On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> wrote:
>
>> On (2011-02-24 17:15 -0800), Joel Jaeggli wrote:
>>
>> > that activity can be simple as front-running large orders (which take
>> > longer to fill) with small ones, an elaborate algorithm is not
>> > necessarily a requirement. I'm kind of down on the market utility of
>> > such activity but it's not presently illegal.
>>
>> I suppose it still may be somewhat more complex task than my trading
>> software, in terms of how many instructions it needs from CPU, and thus
>> necessarily higher latency, as it is competing with other stuff, for
>> example kernel house-keeping.
>>
>> Are these software being ran in regular PC, or has someone tapped this
>> market and is producing FPGA based fixed delay trading solutions at
>> nanoseconds jitter scale?
>> I wonder how much jitter in normal PC could be reduced for running
>> simplistic software, even with esoteric stabbing of the kernel, sub 1ms
>> jitter on software solution seems unachievable.
>>
>
>An FPGA based trading solution would be interesting and probably very
>profitable if it worked.  The bigest problem would probably be the cost of
>the platform withmultiple multi-core proc's and FPGA's vs. how much you'd
>really end up doing in silicon.  The FPGA would be great to do the same
>trades over and over. However, if the software has to use other values to
>figure out what action to take and then program the FPGA on the fly I
>would
>assume everything but the network operation would be slower.  I suppose
>you
>could separate the repetitive actions and use ASICS.  All in all it sounds
>like a fun project though.

Take a look at Activ.  http://www.activfinancial.com/

They offer an FPGA designed just for crunching the raw data that comes in
from the various exchanges and outputs it in a normalized format that has
its own API.  There are others that also play in this space, like Exegy
http://www.exegy.com/, who uses an Infiniband-based approach.

The boxes that run the algorithms also can make use of FPGAs and GPUs for
crunching data.


This stuff is very interesting to watch unfold.
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