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

Upcoming Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

17 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline...

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 London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise 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...