The solution delivers a significant improvement in tick-to-trade latency to radically improve the queue position of trades, and dramatically increase the probability that trades will be executed. The joint solution consists of one Solarflare software-defined NIC managing multiple Xilinx Kintex® UltraScale™ FPGAs running LDA Lightspeed TCP™ core. The solution is available today with Solarflare XtremeScale NICs.

Chicago based Rival Systems has been using Solarflare NICs since 2015 to give its clients the performance they need to compete in the market.

“With any first-in, first-out matching engine there’s an obvious advantage to being at the top of the queue. Traders can get to the top by being faster and smarter than the competition,” said Rob D’Arco, CEO of Rival Systems. “Anytime our clients possess a 2x faster tick-to-trade time, they’re trading with a significant competitive advantage.”

According to Ahmet Houssein, Vice President of Marketing at Solarflare, “The mission of electronic trading operations is to seize opportunities lasting only fractions of seconds. Who wins and who loses is determined by how fast a trader can digest a market feed and place orders. Our benchmark for network performance is Tick-to-Trade latency, which is the time interval between receiving a market Tick showing an opportunity to an algorithm, and sending the Buy/Sell order.”

Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGAs Make Distributed TCP and Tick-to-Trade in 120 Nanoseconds Possible
For many years, NICs with Kernel Bypass have been used to connect trading application servers to Ethernet networks. Solarflare and LDA achieve breakthrough performance by adding to the processing power of NICs, and by implementing a hyper-efficient TCP stack in an FPGA. Additional processing power is added with Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGAs, while an innovative technique called “Delegated TCP send” uniquely delivers lower latency by using several parallel TCP connections. The new class of distributed solutions for TCP was co-developed by combining the LDA Lightspeed TCP IP Core, which can run on multiple Xilinx FPGA-based boards, with the Delegated Sends feature available with Onload™-enabled Solarflare network adapters to manage and maintain TCP connections.

According to Manoj Roge, Director, Data Center Strategy and Marketing, “Xilinx UltraScale FPGAs provide the highest frequency and lowest latency reprogrammable platforms, and are ideal for high-frequency trading applications. The results achieved by Solarflare and LDA using these devices clearly demonstrate this value.”