Altera- or Xilinx-based Platforms Offer Low Latency and Reduced Power Consumption
KIRKLAND, Wash. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — December 9, 2009 — Impulse Accelerated Technologies today announced that it has delivered an FPGA-based financial feed and network packet parsing solution to Athena Capital Research LLC, a quantitative investment manager based in New York City.
Impulse offers customer-programmable feed handling solutions for use in automated trading, arbitrage and real-time analytics. “FPGAs are increasingly finding their way into financial feed management operations due to their inherently deterministic behavior and ability to support ultra-low latency and reduced power consumption relative to software-based solutions,” said David Buechner, Impulse Vice President of Business Development. “Impulse solutions are end-user customizable and offer high performance for financial data processing.”
“We significantly reduced latency using a FPGA-based feed handler from Impulse,” said Evan Wies, the CTO at Athena Capital Research. “The Impulse offering enables us to integrate our feed handling, filtering and analytics in an ultra low latency FPGA solution. Using familiar C tools, we can continually improve the proprietary parts of this system without any intellectual property concerns, which is a distinct competitive advantage for our firm.”
Impulse Xilinx or Altera FPGA-based feed handling systems include customer-programmable elements, optimized network and host processor I/O, and integration into a customer selected server. Upon receipt of the system, the customer uses Impulse C-to-FPGA software to reprogram the Xilinx or Altera FPGA, inserting their strategy into the provided reference design. Impulse software tools allow customers to modify and manage their strategy using standard C programming and debugging approaches.
The customizable feed parsing system can be configured to scan an incoming financial feed, using a direct low-latency hardware network interface, and poll for specific market data. The resulting filtered feed data can be sent back out via a second hardware network interface, or passed to the host processor via a PCI Express or other interface. Sample UDP parsing handlers are available for single packet inspection.
Impulse systems include the customer’s choice of commercial FPGA hardware, a customized HDL infrastructure, Impulse C-to-FPGA software, a reference design and documentation. Prices start at $90,000 and carry no run time royalty or monthly leasing fees.
About Athena Capital Research LLC
Athena Capital Research LLC is a privately-owned, quantitative investment manager located in Manhattan, specializing in fully automated trading strategies.
About Impulse
Impulse Accelerated Technologies provides C-to-FPGA tools and custom hardware/software solutions for financial, defense and industrial customers worldwide. Impulse products are in use at eight of the world’s top ten defense contractors. The company offers software tools, IP libraries and custom engineering services.
Contact:
Impulse Accelerated Technologies
Brian Durwood,
425-605-9543 ext. 101
www.ImpulseC.com