> the main insight was that rather than wait for market signals to then decide what to do, you can precalculate your responses up to and including the actual message to be sent to the exchange.
I saw a talk about this dialed up to eleven: the entire processing occurred in a "smart NIC" instead of the CPU. The response would start getting sent even as the inbound packet was still being received. The go/no-go decision was effectively just sending the final CRC bytes correctly or deliberately incorrectly, thus invalidating the outbound packet that was already 99% sent.
Before that talk I couldn't figure out why there was a market for NICs with embedded FPGAs, CPUs and memory.
Day traders basically subsidised these things, and now they do efficient packet switching for large cloud providers.
Reminds me of how crypto-mining subsidised a lot of GPU development, and now we have 4K ray tracing and AIs thanks to that.
I saw a talk about this dialed up to eleven: the entire processing occurred in a "smart NIC" instead of the CPU. The response would start getting sent even as the inbound packet was still being received. The go/no-go decision was effectively just sending the final CRC bytes correctly or deliberately incorrectly, thus invalidating the outbound packet that was already 99% sent.
Before that talk I couldn't figure out why there was a market for NICs with embedded FPGAs, CPUs and memory.
Day traders basically subsidised these things, and now they do efficient packet switching for large cloud providers.
Reminds me of how crypto-mining subsidised a lot of GPU development, and now we have 4K ray tracing and AIs thanks to that.