ACTIV Financial (booth #3114), an aggregator of data feeds and a provider of low-latency direct-exchange feed technology, is demonstrating the performance of its market data ticker plant software on an Xtreme Data Field Programmable Gate Array — a hardware accelerator that works with AMD's Opteron chip (through the Torrenza initiative). The company says that using the accelerator can reduce data latency to 100 microseconds.
Some Wall Street firms, however, have been hesitant to implement specialized hardware accelerators like FPGA boards because they have to be specially configured and physically installed, and software has to be modified to take advantage of their processing power. "We don't like the idea of someone in a garage with a soldering iron on a custom card, and neither do our customers," notes Frank Piasecki, president of ACTIV Financial.
Today, AMD provides the Torrenza platform into which FPGA boards can plug. And Intel has been working with FPGA makers such as Altera and Xilinx on using their products with the Xeon chip and recently demonstrated a Xilinx board plugged into the Xeon. Intel also is developing an accelerator abstraction layer that would help developers port portions of applications to accelerators. In addition, Intel and IBM are working on a hardware acceleration standardization initiative, based on PCI Express, called Geneseo. Some accelerator providers, including ClearSpeed, already use PCI Express.
Because of this standardization work going on and the crying need for more processing power without increasing server footprints and energy consumption, such specialized coprocessors have a bright future, Piasecki says. "If we stayed on our current platform and continued to parallelize our applications and split them across more boxes, the future looks grim," he says. "In three years we'd have a huge hardware footprint, and it would take a lot of people a lot of money, power, cooling and rack space to process market data. The total cost of ownership of these infrastructures has got to have some new paradigm around which people can work, and we think hardware acceleration is the only credible one available today."
For instance, Piasecki asserts, using hardware acceleration, a North American futures, equities and options ticker plant can run on 12 CPUs instead of 50. "One of the major problems facing direct-feed, low-latency providers is the cost of running these systems," he says. "And hardware acceleration is the holy grail around which we finally see the light."
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