Impulse Accelerated Technologies and Intilop Corporation announced an agreement to interface each company’s IP to create a portable, FPGA-based TCP stack plus client logic system. This system enables internet-connected appliances to parse, filter, trade, and process streaming data at 10 Gb/s, for a 10X speed advantage over many software-based solutions. Effectively, data over the network comes in, the TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) accelerates TCP connections, and Impulse C is used to create hardware-deployed filters, convolutions, encryptors, financial packet “sniffers” or any other process, which requires low latency and limited jitter impact. Moving these applications into hardware, closer to the network stream, relieves the host processor, significantly reduces latency and jitter, and opens up multiple possibilities.
Latency and jitter are concerns in financial markets, where they may have contributed to the market volatility of the past 2 years. Jitter refers to the inability of the processes sitting behind the stream to keep up with volume spikes. Financial streams do not forgive data drop out and require a deterministic, scalable processing architecture to neutralize latency. The Impulse/Intilop architecture enables processing on FPGA, and results returned over TCP/IP, without host intervention, jitter or an O/S.
This Smart Programmable TCP/IP offload engine architecture implements a full TCP/IP stack including control plane and data plane processing, and preprocesses the streams to offload the host. The combined tool set provides a TCP/IP data stream for any type of Ethernet-based streaming data. Where the data would traditionally have gone to a microprocessor, the Impulse C processes “see” and pre-filter the data before the host does. The network connection and packet processing is achieved in FPGA hardware, in real time, at 10G bit rates without the host. Pilot users of hardware-accelerated programmable network interface cards are using them for encoding, encrypting, or financial packet sniffing and processing. Other functions that fit this model include parsing, filtering, and normalizing data streams. C to FPGA programmable NIC software moves hardware closer to the network stream, and provides opportunity to more easily add client trading, analytic logic, and datapath acceleration.
Impulse provides software, training and IP for data, signal or image-processing acceleration via C-to-FPGA optimized compilation.