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takyon writes:

We have to trade faster!

Solarflare Communications is an unheralded soldier in the eternal war on latency. With its founding in 2001, Solarflare took on the daunting raison d'être of grinding down latency from one product generation to the next for the most latency-sensitive use cases, such as high frequency trading. Today, the company has more than 1,400 customers using its networking I/O software and hardware to cut the time between decision and action. In high frequency trading, the latency gold standard is 200 nanoseconds. If you're an equity trader using a Bloomberg Terminal or Thomson Reuters Eikon, latency of more than 200 nanoseconds is considered to be shockingly pedestrian, putting you at risk of buying or selling a stock at a higher or lower price than the one you saw quoted. Now, with its announcement of TCPDirect, Solarflare said it has cut latency by 10X, to 20-30 nanoseconds.

[...] The CTO of an equity trading firm, who agreed to talk with HPCwire's sister [publication] EnterpriseTech anonymously, said his company has been a Solarflare customer for four years and that its IT department has validated Solarflare's claims for TCPDirect of 20-30 nanoseconds latency. He regards Solarflare as a partner that allows his firm to focus on core competencies, rather than devoting in-house time and resources to lowering latency. "It used to be the case that there weren't a lot of commercial, off-the-shelf products applicable to this space," he said. "If one of our competitors wanted to do something like this for competitive advantage, Solarflare can do it better, faster, cheaper, so they're basically disincentivized from doing so. In a sense this is leveling the playing field in our industry, and we like that because we want to do what we're good at, rather than spending our time working on hardware. We're pleased when external vendors provide state-of-the-art technology that we can leverage."

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