About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Activ Taps Solarflare for Gen 3 Ticker Plant, Focuses on TCO Reduction

Subscribe to our newsletter

Moving away from its DIY past, Activ Financial Systems has turned to Solarflare to provide FPGA and network technology for its Generation 3 market data processing unit (MPU), which will be rolled out to customers from this month. While its use of FPGAs has low latency benefits, Activ CTO Mike Dunne says the increasing focus is on reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers by reducing processing equipment footprint and related power consumption.

Activ’s Gen 3 ticker plant incorporates Solarflare’s ApplicationOnload Engine (AOE) technology, which marries an FPGA processor with a 10gE network interface, and Solarflare’s kernel bypass functionality for passing data from a network direct to a server’s main RAM memory with low latency and jitter.

AOE itself leverages a Stratix V FPGA from Altera, which has made it straightforward for Activ to port its existing code.  That code was written for the earlier Stratix II and IV processors that Activ used in its own accelerator card designs found in its Gen 1 and 2 MPUs.  Dunne says that the core firmware code has not required any changes to run on AOE, and benefits from the faster FPGA and increased input/output throughput to the main server.

The increased throughput provided by Gen 3 – in part required as data feeds from the likes of the Options Price Reporting Authority increase their capacity – means that less MPU appliances are required to handle a trading enterprise’s market data processing.

Dunne says this allows trading firms to reduce the TCO of their operations, with less equipment footprint required, less power drawn and less spent on cooling. “It’s no longer about reducing latency,” he notes, suggesting that “TCO is now the focus.”

Gen 3 is set to be deployed in customer sites and within its own co-lo facilities from this month. Activ is also working on the next – 1.13 – release of software for its MPU, which is expected to further increase throughput per server.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: How to make the most of market data

Market data means different things to different organisations, it can be extremely expensive, and often comes with limited licensing contracts. It must be carefully sourced, governed, quality checked, and integrated. And it must be fit for purpose across a number of applications as it is increasingly used to not only meet regulatory obligations, but also...

BLOG

S3 Partners and Boosted.ai Collaborate to Enable Smart Hedging for Institutional Investors

S3 Partners, the financial data marketplace and workflow platform, has formed a strategic partnership with Boosted.ai, the distributed machine learning platform for global investment professionals. Under the new partnership, data from S3 BLACK App and S3 Blackwire OMS will be natively available through the Boosted Insights platform, for immediate use by Boosted.ai clients. This will...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 13th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry, to explore how trading firms are innovating in today’s cloud and digital based environment to create flexible, scalable trading platforms to support speed to market and business agility.

GUIDE

ESG Handbook 2023

The ESG Handbook 2023 edition is the essential guide to everything you need to know about ESG and how to manage requirements if you work in financial data and technology. Download your free copy to understand: What ESG Covers: The scope and definition of ESG Regulations: The evolution of global regulations, especially in the UK...