Hardware acceleration in the spotlight at HPoWS

Last week at the High Performance on Wall Street conference, conversation was dominated by the role that specialty hardware can play in accelerating financial trading environments. Technologies like FPGAs, network processors, ASICs and even GPUs were the center of discussion as firms with direct experience shared performance metrics, specialty hardware providers communicated their advantages and software-only solutions took pot shots.

There are now compelling specialty hardware components for nearly all of the end-to-end performance chain including:

• GPU assist for algo and Monte Carlo simulations (NVIDIA)
• FPGA-based feed handlers (Celoxica , Exegy, Red Line )
• Network processor & FPGA-driven messaging (Solace Systems)
• Network acceleration technologies (Cisco, NetEffect)
• Analytics (XtremeData )

At last year’s HPoWS, hardware acceleration was an emerging story. This year it was center stage in the industry’s premier event focusing on ultra-low latency and coping with data volume growth.