Activ: Cut Networking to Cut Latency

Activ president Frank Piasecki says the latency of the core ActivFeed MPU—Activ's hardware-based ticker plant, which can process the equivalent of double the volume of the Options Price Reporting Authority's datafeed in under 100 microseconds—is measured in single-digit microseconds. "Most of the latency today is in the networking of the hardware stack," Piasecki says.

However, he says the vendor plans to eventually migrate its software feed handlers into its hardware accelerator, removing the network operating system entirely by implementing drivers directly onto a field programmable gate array card so that feeds do not travel over a network OS.

Also, where InfiniBand can be used to provide connections to client applications, the vendor aims to run those applications directly within the MPU appliance by hard-coding them into additional processors that would sit on the same motherboard as the MPU FPGA card, and communicate via processor-to-processor HyperTransport links, Piasecki says.

Though the vendor can optimize exchange data or use Ethernet-to-InfiniBand converters, "the aim is to move a lot of that onto the hardware device," says Activ business development manager James Bomer. "We'll start looking at experimenting on those next steps very soon… but when we might deliver it is another question."