SCIENCE

New Software Modules Enable Three Microsecond Latency For High Frequency Trading and Other Delay Sensitive Applications

Chelsio Communications, a leading provider of 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire adapters, ASICs and unified storage solutions, today announced the availability of its WireDirect technology: software modules that enable direct wire access from user space to the Chelsio T4 network adapter with complete bypass of the kernel, which results in an ultra-low, three microsecond deterministic latency 10Gb Ethernet solution for high frequency trading and other delay-sensitive applications.

The Chelsio WireDirect (WD) modules include WD-QP (Queue Pair), WD-UDP with Multicast, and WD-TRACE.   The WD-QP module provides queue pairs for the user space through which the user application can directly send and receive Ethernet packets to the wire without having to go through a kernel stack.   It provides 100 percent kernel bypass and zero copy with packet polling for data to and from the network wire.  

WD-UDP with Multicast is layered on top of the WD-QP which in turn is layered on top of the actual T4 silicon.  WD-UDP with Multicast is a user-space UDP stack with Multicast address reception and socket acceleration that enables users to run their existing UDP socket applications unmodified.  WD-TRACE allows direct on-the-wire packet tracing for applications that require packet capture, time stamping and sniffing. 

WD-QP performance has been measured at 3.0us and WD-UDP with Multicast at 3.2us.   iWARP and MPI latency is 3.4us and 3.6us respectively.

“High Frequency Trading has transformed the investment landscape, but inefficiencies in the network get magnified with the continual increase in traffic and complexity.  Our Wire Direct software creates a fast path for UDP and multicast traffic with the shortest delay possible, enabling the building of state-of-the-art trading infrastructures based on Ethernet," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio.

The WD Technology

The WD-QP API provides an asynchronous RDMA Verbs-like interface allowing zero-copy low latency Ethernet Communication.  It is intended to be used by middleware to implement a full user mode Ethernet interface, as well as by custom applications needing low latency/high packet rates. The API provides a QP interface for sending and receiving Ethernet packets.

The WD-UDP with Multicast module provides an accelerated Sockets interface for sending and receiving both unicast and multicast UDP datagrams.  No application changes are required to take advantage of WD-UDP with Multicast.  The WD socket library accelerates Socket calls and applications that use these calls will exercise the WD-UDP logic to provide seamless I/O acceleration.  WD-UDP also supports end-to-end traffic prioritization and application I/O QoS through the network interface card and the switch.

WD-TRACE is a user level module that is built on top of WD-QP (similar to WD-UDP with Multicast) and allows bi-directional, direct on the wire packet tracing, packet capture and packet filtering at line rates up to 20Gbps by bypassing the host OS kernel and I/O stack and going directly to the user space.  The hardware packet time stamping capabilities have an ultra-precise resolution of 3.6 nanoseconds.  Additionally, WD-TRACE allows concurrent low-latency WD-UDP operation; when required the trace traffic travels on a separate path through the NIC and goes into a different DMA queue that’s handled by a dedicated core and thus not disruptive to the regular inbound traffic.

Product brief available  at www.chelsio.com/wire_direct.html

Availability

The WD-QP, WD-UDP with Multicast and WD-TRACE for Linux are available now from Chelsio and its distributors.  Additional software modules will be released over the next six months.