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 Connectivity Panel – Highlights with Brunner, Malik and Riddoch

Subscribe to our newsletter

Last month’s Low-Latency Summit in New York City featured two morning panels, one on connectivity, the other on computing. Here’s some quotes and highlights from the connectivity panel …

“Folks have pretty much moved from 1 gigabit ethernet to 10 gig, and a lot are moving to 40 gig. Will see more next year” – Cisco’s Dave Malik.

Malik also noted that increasingly, users are looking to get analytics from their infrastructure – buffer usage, queue depth – to proactively manage.

Joe Brunner from Affirmed Systems in a follow up noted that Google is increasingly interested in offerings for the financial markets, has a global network, and is clearly a leader in analytics.

“Queuing delay really messes you up,” said Solarflare Communications’ David Riddoch. When system components cannot keep up, latency can get pushed from microseconds to milliseconds. But buffering to avoid lost packets is usually preferable to dropping them, which would require a re-transmit. With TCP/IP that could mean a 200 millisecond latency bump.

Also commenting on the move from 1 gig to 10 gig ethernet, he noted that for small packet, the higher clock rate of 10gE network adaptors is a big factor – much more than serialisation improvements.

Somewhat astonishingly, Riddoch noted that InfiniBand does indeed still have an edge over 10gE – perhaps by as much as a microsecond per network hop. But this can be achieved only by using RDMA verbs. When comparing socket-level communications, 10gE is faster, he reckoned.

Riddock also commented that RMDA is better at transporting large payloads between servers, than it is at more generalised messaging. And Brunner made the day for Riddock and Malik when he said that “10gE is a thousand times easier to manage than InfiniBand.”

On the downside, though, Brunner noted that large banks and their policy of installing firewalls makes it hard for them to compete with more specialised firms, that have determined they can do without them.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Trade South Africa: Considerations for Connecting to and Trading the Johannesburg Markets

Date: 28 November 2023 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Interest among the international institutional community in trading South African markets is on the rise. With connectivity, data and analytics options for trading on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange growing more sophisticated, and the emergence of A2X as a credible...

BLOG

IPC Systems and Celoxica Join Forces to Deliver FPGA-Powered Low-Latency Market Data Solution

IPC Systems, the electronic trading and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions vendor, has announced a partnership with Celoxica, a provider of ultra-low latency market data solutions, to deliver an FPGA-powered low-latency normalised market data feed across all asset classes. The joint solution will offer buy side, sell side, and financial markets application providers access to a single API...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

TradingTech Insight Briefing New York will explore how trading firms are innovating and leveraging technology as a differentiator in today’s cloud and digital based environment.

GUIDE

Institutional Digital Assets Handbook 2023

After initial hesitancy, interest in digital assets from institutional market participants has grown over the past three to four years. Early focus inevitably centred on the market opportunities presented by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But this has evolved into a broad acceptance of a potentially meaningful role for digital assets in institutional markets. It’s now...