Low Latency Technology - Removing the Barriers with BittWare

Low latency is the hot topic in the financial trading marketplace. Companies have to react to market events faster than the competition to make money. The round trip between the event and the final trade is quite significant...

• Event occurs at the source venue
• Information about that event is placed in a message on the wire
• Message reaches the decision-making application
• Application makes a trade decision based upon that event
• Order is sent to the trading venue
• Venue executes the order
• Order confirmation is sent back to application

All in a matter of milliseconds....

In April 2012, Fixnetix, global managed services provider for trading, market data and risk control, announced they were the first fintech (financial technology) company in Europe to offer the Altera Stratix V FPGA on the BittWare PCI Express slot-cards. The company announced late November 2010 a real-time low latency filter, iX-eCute, an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), to solve the eternal industry conundrum of pre-trade risk, compliance and ultra-low latency execution.

BittWare's PCI Express slot-cards are the hardware boards that iX-eCute operates on whilst Altera Stratix is the industry’s highest performance FPGA with over 1 TeraFLOPS of processing. iX-eCute firmware deployment relies on minimal delays, significantly reduced jitter, energy and thermal requirements whilst commanding maximum performance per watt. BittWare offers a PCIe-compliant deployable slot-card that works out of the box, with validation, verification, and control software in place.

The S5PE from BittWare is a PCIe x8 card based on the high-bandwidth, power-efficient Altera Stratix V GX or GS FPGA. Features include -

• High density Altera Stratix V GX/GS
• PCIe x8 interface supporting Gen1, Gen2, or Gen3
• 2 QSFP+ cages allows dual 40GigE or 8 10GigE interfaces direct to the FPGA for lowest possible latency
• Up to 16 GB of DDR3 SDRAM with optional ECC
• Utility I/O includes: USB 2.0, RS-232, and JTAG

iX-eCute on the BittWare board with Altera Stratix processing is available for purchase through Fixnetix.

What exactly is High Speed Financial Trading?

It's 'Financial February' here at Sarsen, so we thought it was a good idea to describe exactly what Financial Trading is, specifically the High Speed Financial Trading that we've been focussing on over the last few weeks.

In layman’s terms, it’s the use of very powerful computers programmed with sophisticated instructions to trade stocks and make profits from minute price variations that occur in less than a second.

Simples!

High Speed Financial Trading, or High Frequency Trading (HFT) doesn’t actually have anything to do with ‘investing’ as we know it, it’s simply a set of computing instructions that react to information much faster than any human can. These trades can make significantly less than 1p per share, but if you add up the millions of trades per day you’re looking at a respectable chunk of money!

‘Pretty complex stuff’, I hear you say...

Fortunately BittWare has designed and developed a growing family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware which makes it easier for customers to create system solutions for financial acceleration.

The challenges in this space are quite unique:

• Require ultra-low latency feed handling
• Faster analysis/data correlation
• Maximum performance/watt (minimize energy and thermal requirements)
• Desire for scalable architecture to enable “FPGA Farm” implementation

‘Low-Latency’ is the real buzz word for HFT, with the solution offering the lowest latency being the most attractive to prospective customers.

The BittWare S5-PCIe-HQ half-length PCIe board, which features the Altera Stratix V FPGA, provides systems developers with a high level of system integration, and high-performance network processing, signal processing, and data acquisition possibilities.

For more information get in touch with the Sarsen team on +44 1672 511166, or email us – info@sarsen.net

Busy Little Beavers..... Embedded Applications keeping the Sarsen Team busy...

Now everyone is back in the office, and we are back to full capacity after the summer holidays, it’s time to start thinking about the next few months, and look at the projects that will be keeping us busy until Christmas and beyond! (Only 126 days to go!)

 

Our main focus is the High Speed Financial Trading market. BittWare’s Altera Stratix V FPGA PCIe hardware is optimised for this industry. With multiple lanes of 10GigE straight to the FPGA, and PCI Express Gen 2, combined with on-board memory and optional TOE, as well as additional built-in support for 40 GigE and PCIe Gen3, the financial industry has taken notice!

The new Falcon EPU release from VersaLogic means we are talking to people about all kids of applications, including Mil-Aero, Medical, Security, R&D and Robotics. It’s a really compact board, (around the size of a credit card, and weighing 40g) so it’s also a brilliant solution for use in for portable applications and unmanned systems where Size, Weight and Power consumption (SWaP) are critical design elements.

X-ES customers are also keeping us busy with enquiries, in particular about the XPm2020 and XPedite7470 boards. The 7470 is a high-performance, low-power, 3U VPX-REDI, single board computer based on the 2nd generation Intel® Core™i7 processor or 3rd generation Intel Core i7 processor and Intel QM67 chipset. The XPm2020 is a VITA 62-compliant 3U VPX power supply that takes in a MIL-STD-704 28V-DC input voltage and provides up to 300W on 3.3V, 5V, and ±12V at up to 90% efficiency. Both are available now.

Show and Tell….

We love talking about our products, and we have loads of sample boards we can show you, so If you would like one of our sales team to visit you onsite, to discuss how the products we sell can work in your applications, please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 to arrange a meeting.

BittWare to Exhibit at SIFMA 2012

June 19-20, 2012         Hilton New York

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Tech Expo draws the top technology exhibitors providing services to the financial services industry. It brings together the shared interests of hundreds of securities firms, banks and asset managers. These companies are engaged in communities across the country to raise capital for businesses, promote job creation and lead economic growth.

BittWare has designed and developed a family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware optimised for the financial trading market.  Ron Huizen, Darren Taylor and Chad Hamilton from BittWare will be exhibiting at SIFMA next week on booth #1823, showcasing their (growing) Stratix V family of PCIe cards.  

More than 70 senior regulators and industry experts will participate in 29 educational sessions on the foremost issues facing financial technologists, and the event is expected to bring together more than 4,000 industry-leading professionals to discover the latest trends and solutions.

If you would like to visit BittWare at the SIFMA Tech Expo please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 to arrange a time.

Please contact Sarsen Technology for full details of the full range of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware and software developed for this market. E - info@sarsen.net 

http://www.sarsen.net/dept/financial-trading_d0145.htm

Low-Latency Summit London 2012

Tim Norris, Robbie Burns & Nigel Norman participated in the Low-Latency Summit for High Frequency Financial Trading yesterday. Altera showcased a BittWare S5-PCIe Altera Stratix V FPGA PCIe format board on their booth. Burkhard Jour represented BittWare at the event organised the by the A-Team Group. The event was held at America Square Conference Centre and highlighted the issues around implementing new technologies such as large FPGAs in the HFT market space. There was a good and informed attendance. There was also a nice contrast between high technology such as the Altera Stratix V FPGA with 3.9 billion gates and the 2000 year old Roman wall next to the exhibition space.

Link to the Low-Latency Summit web site:

Low-Latency Summit 2012

Automated Trader: BittWare delivers FPGA Boards for High Frequency Trading

Bittware's high performance Altera FPGA solutions for high frequency financial trading are featured in Automated Trader. BittWare, a provider of fully-validated, deployable Altera-based off-the-shelf FPGA and signal processing boards, has announced the First Customer Shipment (FCS) of the S5-PCIe to a technology leader in the finance and trading industry. The S5-PCIe is the first of a family of PCI Express slot-cards that BittWare is offering to the financial acceleration/HFT (High Frequency Trading) market. Providing CPU offload, high performance transceivers, and optional TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine), the S5-PCIe is a PCIe-compliant deployable slot-card based on FPGA - Altera's Stratix® V.

Link to the Automated Trader web site: Automated Trader.

FPGA Solutions for Automated Financial Trading Market

Busy with lots of new opportunities for the BittWare S5-PCIe Altera Stratix V FPGA board in the automated financial trading market http://bit.ly/vL8e2v

Altera Stratix V FPGA Board for Automated Financial Trading Applications

The BittWare S5-PCIe is the industry's first Altera Stratix® V FPGA-based COTS board and is optimised for high performance computing military, telecommunications test equipment and financial trading applications. The Altera Stratix V FPGA has 3.8 billion transistors and is optimised for demanding computing applications. New project opportunities in the automated financial trading market is keeping us very busy this month.