Activ Unveils Hardware Ticker Plant

The new offering, dubbed ActivFeed MPU (Market Data Processing Unit), codes the ticker plant logic onto field-programmable gate array (FPGA) co-processors that can be plugged directly into CPU sockets on server motherboards, providing direct connections between the data management rules and the CPU and memory, using AMD's Direct Connect Architecture.

Activ will make MPU available as a separate product alongside its existing hosted and client-site ticker plants and direct and consolidated feed offerings, and will be aggressively priced to reflect its expected latency advantages. When rolled out, an MPU would be able to process Activ's consolidated feed, direct exchange feeds and clients' own content.

Activ president Frank Piasecki declines to give precise figures for latency and throughput, but says that the vendor expects at least 20-fold improvements, and to take latency below the 100 microsecond level.

Piasecki says the vendor is hoping to deliver the first MPUs to customers before the end of the second quarter. "We have clients ready to take these… as soon as the devices come out of manufacturing," he says, adding that interest has been "overwhelming" from existing and potential clients looking for a long-term strategy to ensure low latency in the face of ever-rising data volumes, rather than just deploying more servers to run software systems.

Because the potential throughput of MPU is so much greater, "where we've been stacking multiple boxes, we can reduce that to one—with headroom to cope with Opra rates for multiple years into the future," says Activ chief technology officer Mike Dunne. As such, Activ itself will be the first user of MPU, to reduce its own hardware footprint supporting its consolidated feed.

"One of the functions of our market data platform is to calculate derived fields such as high/low and volumes when we receive a price from an exchange… and we do all of these in serial—one after the other—in regular software," Dunne says. "When we move that over to the FPGA… the FPGA has direct access to memory, and as a result is much faster. Instead of running those in serial, now they can run in parallel," and save time, he says.

The move follows that of Exegy, which recently released a long-awaited hardware ticker plant after initially announcing it at last year's SIA show. However, whereas Exegy delivers a proprietary appliance, Activ is banking on making its solution available as part of commodity hardware.

Dunne says Activ had always envisioned producing a hardware-accelerated device but the supporting Direct Connect and HyperTransport technology had not been ready, and had built its datafeed as a "self-describing" feed—partly in expectation of re-implementing it in a hardware environment.