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

Hardware Acceleration – A Roundup and Update with Nomura, Burstream and Fiberblaze

Subscribe to our newsletter

What’s been happening in the world of hardware acceleration of late? Despite a couple of killjoys on LinkedIn who reckon it’s still unproven technology, the answer is – quite a lot.

It was good to get an update from the coalface a couple of weeks ago at our London Low-Latency Summit. There, I chatted to Nomura’s Ben Stephens, who sells HFT and electronic trading services for the investment bank.

Nomura’s NXT platform – it stands for Nomura Extreme Technology – incorporates Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology for market data handling and pre-trade risk checks.

Stephens reckons that using FPGAs – and avoiding the I/O data bottlenecks between network and main CPU – saves NXT between 10 to 50 microseconds in overall latency. It also allows for very deterministic latency – i.e. minimal jitter – which is “really important” for customers running arbitrage trading.

Recent news includes a new managed service from Burstream, which began offering Nasdaq market data using FPGA-based data feed appliances from NovaSparks. Latencies of less than a microsecond – even at peak periods – are being observed.

Then the name Fiberblaze cropped up. A Danish company that builds FPGA-based network cards. Ullink has started to use them in its pre-trade risk offering, presumably offloading checks on to the card.

Also on our radar: Celoxica, with an offering for HFT Futures, and Redline Trading Solutions, which is making Goldman Sachs’ Sigma X dark pool zip along. Unlike many others in the hardware acceleration space, Redline uses Cell processors instead of FPGAs.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process, and extract value from market data, offering greater scalability, efficiency, and intelligence. This webinar,...

BLOG

The Future of Wealth Management: The Rise of Alternatives and Digital Transformation

By Tom Carey, Corporate Vice President, President of Global Technology and Operations at Broadridge. Wealth management stands at a pivotal crossroads, poised for revolutionary change that will fundamentally reshape the delivery, consumption and value of financial services. Global assets under management are projected to reach $145.4 trillion by 2026, with alternative investments growing at twice...

EVENT

AI in Data Management Summit New York City

Following the success of the 15th Data Management Summit NYC, A-Team Group are excited to announce our new event: AI in Data Management Summit NYC!

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...