September 2018 - Netcope Technologies Announces the Appointment of Sarsen Technology Ltd as UK Distributor

As you may have seen in the news this week and across social media, the team at Sarsen Technology Limited is very excited to be working with Netcope Technologies as their exclusive sales and marketing partner in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

If you haven't heard of Netcope Technologies they are about to make a big splash here in the UK.

Based in Brno in the Czech Republic, Netcope specialises in high-performance networking solutions, including state-of-the-art FPGA technology for packet capture, network packet processing (NPP) and low-latency trading applications.


Nigel Norman, Managing Director of Sarsen Technology Limited added, “The embedded FPGA market is changing fast as FPGA technology becomes ever more widely adopted. Our customers, especially in the cyber security, networking and financial trading markets, are looking for more complete solutions from Sarsen Technology rather than just FPGA hardware and software drivers".

Netcope Technologies has innovative, exciting and customer-proven FPGA solutions that have our engineering team chomping at the bit. Their 200GBPS Ethernet adapter will give our networking product customers a significant processing boost, and Netcope’s P4 smart NIC programming solution will rapidly change the way that network data plane processing is achieved.

FinTech customers won't miss out either - Netcope's wire speed packet capture processing is a game changer for low-latency packet processing and the low latency financial trading solution, Tradecope, is a powerful solution for our high frequency trading customers.

We are looking forward to busy but exciting times ahead!

For more information about the new relationship and how it could benefit your FPGA networking application please contact Sarsen Technology on +44 1672 511166, or email info@sarsen.net.

Rugged, conduction cooled XMC Graphics card with two 3G-SDI video outputs and 3G-SDI video capture based on AMD E8860 GPU

New XMC Video Capture Card from EIZO Rugged Solutions

Following their rebranding in April, EIZO Rugged Solutions has announced a new member of the high performance Condor video capture card product family.

The Condor product line offers high performance COTS XMC or VPX form factor graphics and video solutions for millitary /avionics and aerospace markets. Air or rugged conduction cooled variants offer Open GL/3D, H.264, video windowing plus GPGPU capabilities. Linux, Windows and RTOS drivers are supported.

Condor 4107xX XMC Video Capture Card

 Based on the AMD Embedded Radeon E8860 GPU the Condor 4107xX is the latest rugged, conduction cooled addition to the Condor line. The XMC format Condor 4107xX has been designed for seamless integration with VPX single board computers, and offers two 3G-SDI video outputs and 3G-SDI video capture. The board supports video inputs and outputs on the rear XMC I/O connector (Pn6 VITA 46.9, x12d+x8d+24s), and can capture two simultaneous 3G-SDI, HD-SDI or SD-SDI video inputs. The board captures the incoming video data and sends it over PCIe to the host machine as raw data with low latency.

Condor 4107xX is available in various ruggedisation levels, and has been specifically designed to withstand environments with high temperature, shock or vibration (MIL-STD-810g). This makes the board an ideal consideration for defense, command and control, training and simulation, surveillance and radar display environments.

Main Features

• XMC Form Factor
• Rugged XMC Graphics Card with Video Capture
• AMD Embedded Radeon™ E8860 GPU
• 2GB GDDR5 Memory
• 640 Shader Processor, 608/38 GFLOPs Single/Double Precision Performance
• Two 3G-SDI, HD-SDI or SD-SDI Video Outputs
• Two 3G-SDI, HD-SDI or SD-SDI Video Inputs
• DisplayPort, VGA, STANAG 3350 and RGB Sync-on-green Video Outputs
• OpenGL 4.2, DirectX® 11.1, Shader 5.0
• OpenCL™ 1.2, DirectCompute 11 (GPGPU Computing)
• Rugged - MIL-STD-810g Vibration, Shock, Humidity and Temperature as needed
• Rear XMC I/O (VITA 46.9)
• Conduction Cooled
• Comprehensive Customer Support
• Long Term Product Availability
• Windows/Linux (provided by default)
• Real-time Operating System (RTOS) support including VxWorks & Integrity (optional)

For more information on the new board, or any of the products in the Condor line please get in touch with the Sarsen Technology engineering team on +44 1672 511166, or send us an email - info@sarsen.net

Industry Article - How to evolve a risk-based FPGA strategy into a value add strategy

Fixnetix is a leading managed service provider for the global financial community, with a team of highly skilled professionals tasked with developing and providing dynamic products and solutions to meet the ever changing requirements of the banking industry.

Dr Marcus Perrett, Director of Technology and Development, provides an insight into the use of FPGA technology in the finance industry.

How Fixnetix has evolved their risk-based FPGA strategy into a value add strategy 

The use of FPGAs in finance was originally driven by regulation. Brokers were encouraged (or mandated by regulation) to have controls in place to monitor and, if required, cancel or stop clients trading. As clients had traditionally enjoyed direct access to the market via a broker, a system that was positioned between a trading system and the exchange needed to be a fast as possible to reduce the impact to a client’s trading strategy. Hence, FPGA technology was employed to great effect in a number of configurations; some banks built their own systems and several vendors built their own.

Fixnetix has enjoyed success using that model in Canada, where regulation has driven the need for a low latency risk solution for latency sensitive clients trade flows via a broker.

However, regulation alone has not proven to be the only driving factor for the use of FPGA in the finance area. For example, in Japan, the native exchange (TSE) utilises a complex and verbose protocol called arrowhead. In addition, the rules around erroneous trades and protocol discipline are onerous and for potential new entrants into that market it can be a daunting task to overcome.

Several brokers have solved this issue by offering FIX to arrowhead translation services to allow easy and ubiquitous trading, the downside being that such systems are very slow due to the amount of processing required to perform the translation into arrowhead and even more so in generating FIX compliant messages in the return path; this requires Persistence (storage of incoming FIX tags for later use) and Enrichment (calculation of values not available in arrowhead message such as Average Price).

What did Fixnetix do?

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Altera Stratix® V GX/GS PCIe Board with Dual QSFP+

BittWare's S5-PCIe (S5PE) is a PCIe x8 card based on the high-bandwidth, power-efficient Altera Stratix V GX or GS FPGA. 

For more information please contact Sarsen Technology on 01672 511166, or send us an email with your enquiry.

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.

All the way from across the pond.... Sarsen welcomes visitors from BittWare next week.

Next week Sarsen are playing host to Jeff Milrod and Chad Hamilton from BittWare, and we’ll be taking them into the city to visit some of our customers in the Financial Services sector.

Chad Hamilton and Jeff Milrod of BittWare

BittWare has designed and developed a family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware optimised for this marketplace. These kinds of applications require ultra-low latency feed handling as well as super fast analysis and data correlation. BittWare offers FPGA-based PCIe COTS solutions to address the challenges of developing financial applications.

S5-PCIe - Altera Stratix® V GX/GS FPGA PCIe board from BittWare

High frequency automated financial trading uses simulations to provide real-time assistance in decision making. 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 of BittWare’s’ range of Stratix V boards.

In addition to the hardware, the Open Computing Language (OpenCL™) programming model is now supported on Altera’s Stratix® V FPGA architecture and BittWare’s Stratix V FPGA COTS hardware, providing an incredibly powerful solution for system acceleration.

BittWare's OpenCL Bundle is available from Sarsen Technology

For more information about how these solutions could benefit your application please get in touch with the Sarsen Team, on +44 16672 511177, or email us – info@sarsen.net

Cytometry – BittWare Have It Sorted!

Cytometers are instruments that measure the properties of single cells, one cell at a time. They can measure cell size, cell granularity, and the amounts of cell components such as DNA and proteins.

Flow cytometers take in a suspension of cells and run them single file past a laser beam. The laser is used to count different cell populations based on the light that their specific labels emit.

Biological cell classification is a highly complex process, made possible by digital signal processing. In the past, flow cytometry and cell sorting systems have used complex, custom analog circuitry that has remained unchanged for years. BittWare has worked with customers to develop systems that use both DSPs and FPGAs working together to provide the processing. This has created intelligent systems that also provide a high level of flexibility and re-programmability, enabling them to be somewhat general purpose, yet capable of being tailored to the requirements of specific, in this case, medical applications.

BittWare were approached by a customer with a very specific requirement. Their challenge was to provide a very high system throughput - 64 channels of 105 MHz ADC, real-time processing of unpredictable and changing data, a very high level of flexibility for rapid adaptation and updating, along with extended precision and dynamic range.

When the customer started designing their prototype they used DSP, which worked but didn’t give them the flexibility they needed. BittWare took over and created a hybrid signal processing design – DSP + FPGA, which lowered costs and increased flexibility.

Adding an FPGA to the mix meant the number of DSPs could be halved, significantly reducing the overall system cost. The hybrid solution provided the best of both worlds with the DSPs satisfying the need for sustained, low-latency, high-throughput processing, and the FPGAs providing fast, repetitive front-end processing and system flexibility.

For more information on DSP and FPGA technology from BittWare please get in touch - info@sarsen.net.

Have a great weekend!

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

Out and about with Sarsen Technology - this week the Low Latency Summit 2013, London!

So it's been another busy week for the Sarsen Technology sales team.

Alongside our friends at BittWare we participated at the Low Latency Summit in London, which gave us a great platform to show off the new half length Stratix V PCIe board from BittWare, and tell everyone all about the Altera OpenCL support (and special pricing!) for BittWare FPGA hardware.

Robbie and Nigel at the Low Latency Summit Feb 19th 2013

It was a well attended event, with some great networking opportunities for new and existing customers, as well as some thought provoking seminars focussing on how low latency, cloud and big data technologies are combining to support automated trading.

The Low Latency Summit has been running in London since 2010 at the America Square Conference Centre. It's a modern building with a genuine bit of history too, as the original London Wall, (one of the largest construction projects carried out in Roman Britain) runs right through the venue, providing a fascinating and unique feature.

The Roman Wall at the America Square Conference Centre

This is the second time Sarsen have attended the show, and it won't be the last. Check out the photos below!

Nigel and Jeff Milrod (CEO- BittWare) at the Low Latency Summit 2013

Nigel and Jeff chatting to attendees at the Low Latency Summit 2013

Ron Huizen (VP Technology, BittWare) demonstrating OpenCL support for BittWare FPGA boards

Sarsen Spotlight Series ... This week, All You Ever Wanted To Know About 'Our Tim!'

Tim Norris
Tim's Twitter Feed
Tim's LinkedIn Profile
NAME – Tim Norris
ROLE – Sales Account Manager
TIME SERVED – 7 years

Tim is one of our longest serving inmates, and has been a part of the Sarsen sales team for nearly 7 years. Tim manages some of our biggest accounts, across a variety of market sectors. He has been focussing on our HFT customers recently, winning some significant business with the BittWare Altera Stratix V boards.

Because he’s been here so long, Tim is a walking repository of useful information. (Mostly.) He is able to help with queries about any of our 10 manufacturers, and is pretty handy with a screwdriver when the situation arises and we have to get intimate with the hardware!

Tim’s Hobbies
Tim has recently learnt to ride a bike….. down hills, through mud, over ramps. He’s a keen mountain biker, and spends his weekends on 2 wheels around Wiltshire and Wales. Tim is also captain of his local pool team. When he has a spare 5 minutes, he takes pictures with one of his many cameras.

Tim’s Favourite things -

Favourite music – (Very) Loud Guitar Rock
Favourite Colour – Black
Favourite Food – Mexican
Favourite Movie – True Romance
Favourite book – Jaws (Peter Benchley)
Favourite flavour Crisps – Smoky Bacon

Final Insight
What did you want to be when you were little? - A ZooKeeper

If someone were to make a movie about your life, who would you hope to play you? – Hugh Jackman.
(We actually did a scientific experiment on an unnamed app, and Hugh Jackman was the first name out. Tim – “He wouldn’t have to work out much more to be as muscly as me”).

Every Tuesday we shine the spotlight on an area of our lives at Sarsen Technology; whether it's a type of technology, one of our manufacturers, or as we have today, giving you a peek into the (sometimes strange) world of our staff!

If you'd like to get to know us even better, give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email. We look forward to hearing from you!

'Financial February' from Sarsen Technology!

You’ve reached the Sarsen Blog. Lucky you!

If it’s your first visit, welcome. If you’ve been here before, welcome back! If you accidentally clicked the wrong link you should stick around… You might learn something!

We started 2013 with Green Month. January has seen our blog feature some pretty cool technology involved in renewable energy, global warming data collection, utility monitoring and wind turbines, as well as our super-informative Spotlight Series.

This month is ‘Financial February’. We’ll be bringing you all the latest product news for the high speed financial trading market, available from our 10 US manufacturers. We will also be sharing all the insider news and views from our exhibition stand at the Low Latency Summit on February 19th in London. We’ll be on stand 105 alongside BittWare and their latest Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware and software technology, with a very special feature showcasing the OpenCL tools designed for low-latency financial trading.

If that wasn’t enough we’ll also be shining the Spotlight on another member of the Sarsen team, and sharing some more trade secrets about the exciting technology we are lucky enough to be involved with.

See you on Tuesday for the first Sarsen Spotlight post of February 2013!

Spotlight On… The First Exhibition of the Year!

It’s still only January, but we're not letting the snow hold us back - we are already gearing up for our first event of the year!

Sarsen Technology will be at the Low Latency Summit with BittWare, showcasing the latest Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware for financial trading.

Held at the America Square Conference Centre on 19th Feb 2013, the Low Latency Summit focuses on the evolution of high performance technology underpinning profitable automated trading strategies, with a focus on real life experience from the European marketplace.

This is the only event for the financial markets to examine these kinds of technologies, and align them to the trading process. Alongside the conference program, an 'exhibits' area will allow real-life solutions to be demonstrated.

BittWare recently announced special pricing on their S5-PCIe-HQ PCIe COTS board, specifically for use with Altera's Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL. The Altera SDK for OpenCL enables FPGAs to work in concert with the host processor to accelerate parallel computation, at a fraction of the power compared to hardware alternatives.

Come and meet the BittWare and Sarsen Technology teams on Stand 105 to learn more about the very latest Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware and software technology including the OpenCL tools designed for low-latency financial trading applications.

Full details of the event can be found on the www.low-latency.com web site.

We look forward to seeing you there!!

Sarsen Technology is here if you need us, Santa!

Things are ramping up at the North Pole....

On the run up to Christmas Eve, Santa has to go through his list of names, and check it twice, to see who has been naughty and who has been nice. He then has to decide which toy each child deserves. It’s a long process, and it could be much simpler, using BLITzEN – the BittWare Low latency Intelligent Toy Evaluation Network.

It’s based on the Altera Stratix V FPGA, provides CPU offload, the highest performance transceivers , and with maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements it’s perfect for Santa’s busy Workshop, as it helps him to determine not just what children want but rather what they deserve.

Those Reindeer are an essential part of the process, and Santa knows he needs to make sure they are happy and performing at their best. The UEI Cube is small and rugged, and can be used to measure the tension on their specially adapted harnesses using its strain gauge layers, so Santa knows the second there are any problems. That sleigh is heavy!

Flying around the world in a reindeer-drawn sleigh would be made much easier with a display system running on the Copperhead Core i7 EBX board from VersaLogic. Its performance level allows for the integration of multiple high-bandwidth functions, such as digital signal processing and real-time video processing. The Copperhead features a high-speed memory interface, up to 16 GB on-board RAM capacity, and three independent display outputs, so Santa can check his route, run his aforementioned naughty-or-nice list, and still video-chat with the sleigh-port, an underground facility run by Elves that serves as a command and control centre. 

Phew! Its a busy time for the guys and girls at the North Pole, but don't worry Santa, Sarsen Technology is here to help. Give us a call on +44 1672 511166 or drop us an email!!

Super Speed HFT with BittWare FPGA PCIe boards

High Frequency Trading is made even faster with FPGA Solutions from BittWare!

In layman’s terms, high-frequency trading (also known as HFT) is the buying and selling of stocks at super fast speeds, with the help of very powerful computers. Using complex algorithms, these computers can scan dozens of public and private marketplaces at the same time and execute millions of orders a second.

High-frequency trading is highly dependent on ultra-low latency as well as ever-faster analysis/data correlation. The products used also need to achieve maximum performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements. BittWare offers a range of FPGA-based PCIe COTS solutions to address the challenges of developing financial applications.

BittWare’s Stratix V PCIe cards offer the industry’s highest performance FPGA for network and algorithm acceleration. These boards provide the ultimate in low latency with high performance FPGA transceivers (no external PHY) and optional TCP/IP offload engine. With maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements and QDR II/II+ combined with 10GigE straight to the FPGA (no conversion to XAUI) for ultra-low latency, BittWare’s PCIe boards are ideal for applications in the High Frequency Trading (HFT) market.

Fixnetix, global managed services provider for trading, market data and risk control, were the first fintech (financial technology) company in Europe to offer the Altera Stratix V FPGA on the BittWare PCI Express slot-cards. The Altera Stratix V FPGA with integrated 10GigE and BittWare PCIe Gen 3 slot card is ideal for iX-eCute, the Fixnetix FPGA firmware for nanosecond trading and pre-trade risk checks across multiple asset classes. BittWare 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.

If you would like more information about how the BittWare hardware could work in your application please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email!