SCIENCE

Impulse and Stone Ridge Technology has announced a customizable NASDAQ ITCH message parsing system built on the Stone Ridge HFT-X FPGA platform to be demonstrated at the Flagg HPC Financial Markets meeting in New York on Monday, Sept. 20, 2010. The Stone Ridge platform processes market data like a customized Network Interface Card, maintaining an order spread for an arbitrary number of equities. The system pushes order information to the network every second on receipt of the ITCH heartbeat to measure and compare latency directly with a CPU equivalent. The demonstration graphically shows the lower deterministic latency of the FPGA system vs. the higher variable latency on the CPU. The system employs Impulse C’s Co-Developer compiler to allow C programmability.

Financial organizations strive for microsecond advantages over their competition. With the HFT-X system, Stone Ridge has put "Trigger-to-Trade" capability into the FPGA and bypassed CPU processing entirely. The advantages of FPGAs are extremely low and highly deterministic latency systems that can operate at line-rate speeds. In practical terms this means traders can be confident they are getting the same latency on every trade regardless of market conditions. Variability is greatly reduced on FPGAs since hardware based parsing does not utilize an OS and is not subject to periodic interruption by other system processes. Hardware without an OS has significantly greater parsing capacity.

"FPGAs are ideal for network processing. They can operate at line rates with extremely low and deterministic latency. One of the most disconcerting situations for traders occurs when their systems get overwhelmed in market surges. The HFT-X can process data as fast as it can be sent on Ethernet and turns it around with completely deterministic latency measured in a few micro-seconds," commented Vincent Natoli, president of Stone Ridge Technology. Natoli continued, "The partnership with ImpulseC provides a path for C programmability which we think will be very attractive to our clients in the financial sector."

"Network-connected hardware-based parsing offers disruptive, compelling infrastructure changes for financial trading organizations," continued David Buechner, vice president of Impulse Accelerated Technologies.

The Stone Ridge/Impulse collaboration is an example of hardware/software co-design where computational resources are optimized for the software problem being addressed. System teams can contact Stone Ridge and Impulse to evaluate this high-throughput, high-data integrity solution for their specific trading applications.