netmap looks promising but it's about to be blown away by the ability to inject packets into L3 cache in the next iteration of Intel chips which have DCA - direct cache access

A good overview of FPGA and GPU technology in this presentation http://www.infoq.com/interviews/nolan-hardware-acceleration

The LEON3 is a synthesisable VHDL model of a 32-bit processor compliant with the SPARC V8 architecture. The model is highly configurable, and particularly suitable for system-on-a-chip (SOC) designs. The full source code is available under the GNU GPL license, allowing free and unlimited use for research and education. LEON3 is also available under a low-cost commercial license, allowing it to be used in any commercial application to a fraction of the cost of comparable IP cores. The LEON3...

Some feedback from this event which I attended today. Event http://events.waterstechnology.com/etas Infrastructure Management: Reducing costs, Improving performance, Professor Roger Woods, Queens University, Belfast Prof Woods gave an impassioned talk about a tool that he has developed which takes c++, allows you to navigate the code and identify subsystems which you can target to run on hardware or emulation of hardware. He worked on the JP Morgan collaboration with Maxellor and...

Finally my first post to the Enhyper blog, on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I've just returned from speaking at HFT World 2011 in Amsterdam. Turnout wasn't as large as I expected, however, there was some good discussion around what the future is likely to hold. I shared some of my views on embracing the end-to-end principle with Mike O'Hara from the High Frequency Trading Review, and I'll return to this post to set some of those views down in blog space a bit later. My background's in IP/telecoms...

I was kindly invited to give an expert session by Thomson Reuters when I was between assignments. I gave an hour presentation which has been edited into four sessions: On the FX Business Model http://thomsonreuters.na4.acrobat.com/p72695781/ On FX and the OTC Market http://thomsonreuters.na4.acrobat.com/p97524929/ On High Frequency Trading http://thomsonreuters.na4.acrobat.com/p67792422/ On FX Strategies http://thomsonreuters.na4.acrobat.com/p10287782/ I'm now gainfully employed so back to...

TeleGeography produce a topological map of submarine cables which is of interest to hft firms. There are many aspects to consider when procuring global connectivity. Before you choose a suppler, perhaps some important questions to ask are: What are the fibre miles versus physical miles of long haul links How do you measure your quoted latencyWhat is your underlying network technology and how is it provisioned What network equipment do you use for your core network How many hardware queues on...

Met with Barry, CTO of Tervela on Friday. He recommended taking a look at the Cavium Octeon II NPU card which has 32 cores, a C like interface and shiny new architecture.

FTQ is a useful tool dug up by Bruce which we've started using for jitter analysis and it's showing up some surprising results. The idea is simple - how many iterations of a variable can be performed in a fixed time. I started by running the threaded version on our 8 core, dual cpu server for approximately 3 minutes using the following command: t_ftq -t 8 -n 450000 Using Octave, I calculated the variance (42133) and standard deviation (2485.1.) Plotting this gave this over populated graph: Next...

Here's my input to the panel discussion for HIFREQ 2011. • What are the different set ups and combinations for HFT architecture? I have experience of four different architectures: traditional monolithic event queue and broadcastreflective memory, distributed processingdma, shared memory, multi-process and multicasttrading engine on a cardThe latter appears to be the dream set up. It consists of an FPGA enabled network card with the strategy running on the card itself. This has been implemented...