TRADING: FPGAs
The modern art of the FPGA
Cisco is releasing the creative potential in field programmable gate arrays. Andrew Tennant, James Beeken and Thomas Scheibe consider how the future might be redrawn It was Picasso who said ‘everything you can imagine is real’, but it could be the marketing slogan for a piece of kit that’s elevating programming in one area of financial services to an art form. The technology is the field programmable gate array, more commonly known as FPGA, in which Cisco has invested the future of its ultra-low-latency business, supporting the world’s fastest, high-frequency traders, since acquiring specialist Exablaze (a leader in FPGA in financial services) at the start of 2020. “Think of the FPGA as a blank canvas, with a physical capability that’s predefined but functionality that’s undefined,” says Andrew Tennant, who leads Cisco’s global ultra-low latency solutions sales team. “It can solve problems that don’t exist yet.” That probably sounds as whacky as some of Picasso and his Cubist chums’ ideas did way back at the beginning of the 20th century… but remember, they sparked a movement that revolutionised the way we see art today. Cisco isn’t alone in thinking that FPGAs could redraw the future as one that relies less on central processing units (CPUs) www.fintechf.com
and application specific integrated circuitware (ASIC) in certain environments – especially those that depend on ultra-low-latency, such as fighter jet systems and high-frequency trading (HFT) exchanges, where messaging delays are critical and crashes to be avoided. In 2018, for instance, Intel bought Altera, one of the largest producers of FPGAs, for similar reasons. In high-frequency trading, the FPGA is the avant-garde in computer programming because it not only drives out latency, but also offers traders another big – possibly the biggest – competitive advantage. And that’s flexibility, says James Beeken, who came across to Cisco with the Exablaze team. “If we had selected ASIC as the core element for our products, we’d have had to fix our design, and that would’ve dictated the growth and path of the product,” explains Beeken, who’s now responsible for Cisco’s sales and business development in the EMEA region. “With the FPGA at the heart of Cisco/Exablaze switches, network interface cards (NICs) and other future products we’re developing, we’ve a fully-programmable platform, which
means it’s forever evolving. If our clients ask us to add features and functionality, or improve existing features, we’re able to. It means we can not only develop ultra-low latency platforms, but can a lso keep those platforms right at the forefront of the market while meeting bespoke client requests.” In other words, clients no longer need to choose between low latency, performance and time-to- implementation – they can have it all. Historically, that has come at a higher cost, given every application on a FPGA had to be written by what we might call the digital artists – the Cisco engineers. But, since the beginning of 2021, any client can pick up the paintbrush and, as Beeken puts it, ‘let their mind run free’. “The code itself is the firmware,” explains Tennant. “It essentially lays out a an electrical circuit on the FPGA to drive that hardware performance. That can be done by our own engineering team internally, but the hope is to expand it to other folks with terrific skills and ideas for solving their own problems. Those are the end customers and consultancies that have the expertise in-house.” Issue 21 | TheFintechMagazine
103
