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

Summit Compute Panel – Mantara’s Arnold on Leveraging Technology

Subscribe to our newsletter

Concluding our coverage of last month’s Low-Latency Summit in New York City, the compute panel allowed Mantara chief architect David Arnold to discuss how the trading application vendor leverages technologies to reduce latency.  Mantara provides a platform for market data delivery, order routing and pre-trade risk, with customers requiring performance across the latency spectrum.  As such, the company keeps a strong focus on underlying technologies, and looks to leverage them as much as possible.

Arnold noted that the company has divided its technology approach into two streams, based on the latency needs of its customers.  For those requiring less than 100 microseconds, it has a software platform running on commodity x86 hardware.  For below 10 microseconds, it has a hardware/firmware offering.

For its software platform, Mantara focuses on the application architecture, paying attention to such details as binding threads to cores, keeping inter-thread communication to cores on the same chip, and making use of kernel bypass to deliver network traffic direct to the application.  Using these techniques, latencies as low as 10 to 20 microseconds can be achieved.

For the sub-10 microsecond world, where improvements in the 100s of nanoseconds are sought, Mantara relies on a hardware PCIe card, hosting a packet processor, which executes functions in firmware.

Packet processors are general purpose CPUs that have been optimised to perform I/O functions, such as memory management, packet steering, and network interfaces.  Mantara uses packet processors from GE Intelligent Platforms, and also leverages network stack technology from 6Wind.

Arnold noted that a packet processor direction provides good performance at the right price point, and that they approach FPGAs in terms of performance, but offer more flexibility, because they can be programmed using traditional techniques.

Mantara writes its code in C, rather than C++, in order to keep more control over the execution of it – there are “no surprises” with C, Arnold said.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Re-architecting the trading platform for interoperability, resilience and profitability

Trading platforms have come a long way since the days of exchanging paper certificates and shouting across trading floors, pits and desks in the early 2000s, but there is progress still to be made as firms strive to reduce risk, increase profitability, and make their mark in digital assets trading. This webinar will review the...

BLOG

Overbond and interop.io Partner to Enhance Fixed Income Trading Workflows

Overbond, the fixed income data, analytics and trade automation solutions provider, has partnered with interoperability specialist Interop.io, to improve fixed income trader workflows through FDC3 interoperability. The partnership aims to address the prevalent challenges of data silos and liquidity fragmentation in the credit markets, by enabling clients to integrate various applications and features into one...

EVENT

ESG Data & Tech Summit London

The ESG Data & Tech Summit will explore challenges around assembling and evaluating ESG data for reporting and the impact of regulatory measures and industry collaboration on transparency and standardisation efforts. Expert speakers will address how the evolving market infrastructure is developing and the role of new technologies and alternative data in improving insight and filling data gaps.

GUIDE

Fatca – Getting to Grips with the Challenge Ahead

The industry breathed a sigh of relief when the deadline for reporting under the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) was pushed back to July 1, 2014. But what’s starting to look like perhaps the most significant regulation of the next 12 months may start to impact our marketplace sooner than we think, especially...