xCelor Slashes Switch Latency, Bolsters Troubleshooting Capabilities

The new switch has 32 ports, compared to 48 ports on its predecessor, the XPM² switch, and six SSD drives for data capture and storage. It can replicate data between ports at 3 nanoseconds, and performs "muxing" (or "multiplexing")─sending order data back to an exchange without passing through a full-service switch that can add latency─in 80 nanoseconds.

"Now, we can do in 80 nanoseconds what XPM² did in 130ns," says xCelor chief technology officer Rob Walker. Part of the speed gain was achieved by moving to Altera's new Aria 10 FPGA cards, which are already proving faster than the current range of Altera Stratix 5 chips, while the vendor has also benefited from building its own FPGA boards, whereas it previously sourced FPGAs from a third-party supplier.

"This was specifically designed for XPM3 so we could give the switch as many ports as we wanted," Walker says. "This will form the FPGA platform of choice for xCelor products going forward, including our feed handlers... and allows us to future-proof our platform. It's nice to have complete control over everything one uses─and with a third-party FPGA, we didn't. But now we can spin individual boards optimized for specific applications."

Making its own FPGA boards offers two additional benefits to xCelor, Walker says. First, self-manufacturing makes the overall cost of FPGAs much cheaper, he says, while the second avenue is that xCelor can begin selling FPGA cards. "We are considering selling this as a generic FPGA card for other people to program," he adds.

Meanwhile, the SSD ports "allow you to troubleshoot your network with minimal effort," by supporting "high-fidelity" data capture and replay with timestamps accurate to 10 nanoseconds, and to record and replay data on a rolling basis without having to deploy expensive appliances at different locations on a firm's global network─or, since these devices are often expensive, send the same appliance to different locations.

In addition, the vendor has made it easier for users to deploy applications or intelligence on the switch itself, to allow them to run algorithms closer to the source of the data, by running their application directly on the switch, rather than─as with XPM²─having to code it onto an FPGA card.

Walker says xCelor will ship the first of the new switches to an unnamed global proprietary trading firm this week, and that XPM3 will appeal most to the vendor's existing base of banks and prop traders concerned with latency and the performance of their networks, though he adds that it could also be of use in high-performance computing environments outside financial services, such as video distribution and telecoms.