High-Frequency Trading on Xilinx FPGAs? Aldec demos Kintex UltraScale board at Trading Show 2017, Chicago

You’ve probably heard that “time equals money.” That’s especially true with high-frequency trading (HFT), which seeks high profits based on super-short portfolio holding periods driven by quant (quantitative) modeling. Microseconds make the difference in the HFT arena. As a result, a lot of high-frequency trading companies use FPGA-based hardware to make decisions and place trades and a lot of those companies use Xilinx FPGAs. No doubt that’s why Aldec is showing its HES-HPC-DSP-KU115 FPGA accelerator board at the Trading Show 2017 being held in Chicago, starting today.

Aldec HES-HPC-DSP-KU115 FPGA accelerator board

This board is based on two Xilinx All Programmable devices: the Kintex UltraScale KU115 FPGA and the Zynq Z-7100 SoC (the largest member of the Zynq SoC family). This board has been optimized for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and prototyping of DSP algorithms thanks to the Kintex UltraScale KU115 FPGA’s 5520 DSP blocks. This board partners the Kintex UltraScale FPGA with six simultaneously accessible external memories—two DDR4 SODIMMs and four low-latency RLDRAMs—providing immense FPGA-to-memory bandwidth.

The Zynq Z-7100 SoC can operate as an embedded Linux host CPU and it can implement a PCIe host interface and multiple Gigabit Ethenert ports.

In addition, the Aldec HES-HPC-DSP-KU115 FPGA accelerator board has two QSFP+ optical-module sockets for 40Gbps network connections.