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How does Jane St. use FPGAs to make money trading? My impression was that unless the application demands real speed (i.e., microseconds), write it as software
by supahfly_remix 8y ago
How does Jane St. use FPGAs to make money trading? My impression was that unless the application demands real speed (i.e., microseconds), write it as software that run in a general purpose processor, not in an FPGA. x86s always get the latest semiconductor processes, while FPGAs always lag.
- logicchains 8y agoHigh-frequency trading in a developed market demands response times on the order of nanoseconds, whereas anything in software is unlikely to get under a microsecond. If you're too slow, all the obvious efficiencies in the market have already been corrected by faster firms, so you miss out on a bunch of easy trades.
- supahfly_remix 8y agoWhere does this nanosecond number come from for HFT? 1 ns is the time light takes to travel 30 cm in a vacuum. Are these firms only trading with firms that are a few meters away? How about round trip times? I believe only 10s of microseconds are significant, not nanoseconds.
- jonnii 8y agoThat is exactly what is happening in high frequency trading. Firms are paying crazy money to be colocated in the same data centers as the exchanges.
- gcb0 8y agoAnd we as a society know that and think it is normal. Crazy.
- akatechis 8y agoExactly. At an investment bank for which I used to work in NYC, they moved their datacenter to be next door to the exchange's datacenter just to reduce latency. Because in HFT, every fraction of a second can mean the difference between 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars in profit/loss.
- analognoise 8y agoYou're right. A 100MHz clock has a period of 10nS. I can tell you exactly how many of them my data path will take (I've only ever used clocks up to about 300MHz in an FPGA - 600 for things like DDR4 memory). What GP means is that the portion of the overall latency which you can control must respond as quickly as possible, and you do count nanoseconds. Obviously HFT has not invented superluminal communication techniques.
- zkms 8y ago> Obviously HFT has not invented superluminal communication techniques. They haven't, but they've put in tremendous resources into going above the speed of light in optical fibre, including the use of point-to-point microwave links and, when it's impossible to place towers for microwave links (for example, across the Atlantic Ocean), the use of HF/shortwave (as in 3-30MHz stuff) radio.
- fileeditview 8y agoMy question may show my ignorance but how would anyone or anything go above the speed of light? Could you elaborate please?
- detaro 8y agoSpeed of light in fibre is lower than speed of light in air, so you can beat fibre speed of light by building fast wireless networks.
- fileeditview 8y agoThanks. I just looked it up and really wasn't aware of the huge difference.
- diggerNick6771 8y agoIt's not really the fibre that slows down the signal as much as the opto-electrical repeaters that relay the signal many times as it travels vast distances. Light can only go a few km before it needs to be boosted
- analognoise 8y agoLots of things depend on latency, which an FPGA can tune by creating custom data pipelines. Microseconds is really a long time in FPGA land. But more importantly, FPGAs are parallel in a way conventional processors aren't.
- Cyph0n 8y ago> x86s always get the latest semiconductor processes, while FPGAs always lag Two issues with this: 1) You cannot compare an FPGA architecture to a general purpose CPU. FPGAs are massively parallel by design and have near zero overhead, so 100 MHz in an FPGA != a 100 MHz CPU. 2) FPGAs do not lag that far behind and are moving to 16 nm and beyond for higher end products. Besides, due to 1), there really is no real need to move to lower nodes yet.