About a-team Marketing Services

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

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

Unlocking the Value of Data as a Differentiator

The rhetoric around data as a strategic asset is now well established across capital markets. But as AI adoption accelerates and pressure mounts to deliver tangible outcomes, the real challenge is turning that rhetoric into operational reality. Access to data is no longer the constraint. What matters now is how effectively firms can organise, govern,...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

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...