Celoxica Bows FPGA FX, Fixed Income Handlers

UK-based low-latency feed handler vendor Celoxica has released hardware-accelerated handlers and order-routing components to support low-latency market data capture and trade execution for the foreign exchange and fixed income markets.

Celoxica already offers FPGA-based feed handlers and trading components for the equities, futures and options markets, designed for use in co-location environments. The new feed handlers—known as the Generalized Market Accelerator (GMAC), while the order routing accelerators are known as Generalized Exchange Access (GXA)—initially cover feeds of FX spot and derivatives data from Icap’s EBS brokerage, Currenex, and Hotspot FX. The vendor already supports data for FX futures traded on CME Group via its existing feed handler for CME data. The fixed income handlers cover feeds from Icap’s Brokertec electronic bond trading platform and eSpeed, and are available separately or in The Container, the vendor’s single-server solution for accelerated data and order-routing across multiple markets.

Lee Staines, president of Celoxica, says that as the FX market—the largest asset class by daily turnover—becomes more electronic and accessible to those outside the realm of the major FX dealer banks, it is becoming increasingly important that trading firms can access that pool of liquidity “in a competitive way,” which means being able to achieve low latency while minimizing datacenter footprint growth. Algorithmic and arbitrage trading is also being applied more in the fixed income markets as they have also become more electronic and exchange-like, with multiple electronic venues providing inputs for automated, model-triggered strategies.

“The importance of latency varies across strategies. Speed is important… but so is determinism and—more and more in the current environment—cost, since deploying in co-lo centers can be expensive. So having a scalable technology that’s easy to deploy can mean a lot,” Staines says, adding that existing clients of its equities feed handlers are able to access the main equity markets on a single FPGA card -- though whether clients will want to deploy individual or multiple Containers will depend on their specific requirements. "Since processing is offladed via the FPGA cards, more server resources are available for value-added processing, and in some cases, clients have been able to reduce the number of servers by a factor of 10, collapsing their infrastructure down to one multi-core server and removing unnecessary network hops."

Because the core of the GMAC handlers -- which comprise hardware, middleware and software drivers -- is common across exchanges, utilizing plug-ins developed to address the specifics of individual marketplaces, with a normalized output, clients who implement it for one market can easily extend it to others, he says. “We wanted to make a modular solution that would be scalable and can be used for single or multiple markets, and for data or order entry, or both… to help our clients focus on their own IP and strategies,” he adds.

The importance of latency varies across strategies. Speed is important… but so is determinism and—more and more in the current environment—cost, since deploying in co-lo centers can be expensive. So having a scalable technology that’s easy to deploy can mean a lot.

These clients of Celoxica’s handlers for equities and derivatives markets—typically high-frequency traders both within banks and at independent firms—are now looking to extend their strategies to other asset classes, and are looking to leverage the vendor’s technology in other parts of their firms, Staines says. As such, Celoxica will work with customers to prioritize which further FX and fixed income execution venues it will add support for next. “We have clients using these products, and we are working with them to develop the roadmap,” he says.