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

Solarflare Leverages FPGAs for ApplicationOnload Engine

Subscribe to our newsletter

Solarflare Communications has announced its ApplicationOnload Engine (AOE) – combining 10gE networking with FPGA technology that allows trading applications to run fully on a network card, for the lowest latency.

Planned to ship in Q2, AOE is Solarflare’s response to wide customer demand, says CEO Russell Stern.  Already well established in financial markets firms with its network cards and OpenOnload technology – allowing kernel bypass communication between network and application memory – Stern says many customers asked for an on-card FPGA on which they can run code for even lower latency.

Solarflare expects to deliver AOE as both a basic platform – for trading firms to build their own applications, leveraging built-in network stacks for TCP/IP, UDP and sockets communications – and also with pre-built functionality, such as primary/backup data feed arbitration, symbol filtering, and exchange protocol support.  OpenOnload support for low-latency communication with server-based applications is also included.

Stern says that Solarflare will build up a catalog of third party certified applications, as well as sell through OEM relationships. As with OpenOnload’s support for standard socket communications, Solarflare is looking to make AOE very easy to program to by developers.

For now, Stern is not saying who is supplying the FPGA silicon, acknowledging it’s either Altera or Xilinx. That’s partly because the supplier might well change as the product is rolled out. Both vendors are “very competent” he says, but adds that his technical team currently prefer the development toolkit from one of them. AOE cards will feature up to four 10gE ports, and contain 16GB of RAM.

The company is working with six financial markets companies as early adopters – two of them being exchanges, and the rest being investment banks. Stern says the Solarflare has canvassed many of its 500+ customers and there is very strong demand for the FPGA functionality.

Solarflare isn’t the first, or only, vendor or offer networking and FPGAs on a single card – products already exist from Accelize, AdvancedIO Systems, BittWare, Fiberblaze and Intilop – but as a well established vendor for low-latency financial trading applications, and with a large customer base, its impact on the hardware accelerated application space could well be significant. Certainly, it’s a big boost and validation for FPGA adoption in financial markets.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

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

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 reduce costs. Use cases of specific importance to the finance sector, such as data...

BLOG

Enhancing Trader Efficiency: Interoperability, Automation, and the Path to Smarter Desktops

In the face of intensifying demands on trading desks, the pressure to streamline workflows and enhance productivity has never been greater. So how can trading firms modernise the trader desktop without creating disruption? What’s the real return on investment for low-code, no-code, and interoperability tools? And how do firms balance build-versus-buy decisions when designing next-generation...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

ESG Data Handbook 2022

The ESG landscape is changing faster than anyone could have imagined even five years ago. With tens of trillions of dollars expected to have been committed to sustainable assets by the end of the decade, it’s never been more important for financial institutions of all sizes to stay abreast of changes in the ESG data...