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Not my first rodeo :-)

I too made a real time hardware level trading system back in the day, on the back of building a multi channel seismic aquisition system with a custom RealtimeOS talking to a bunch of DSP cards that each sampled a trailing flotation cable that each had multiple microphones with the entire grid going toward building up a profile of the seafloor and layers underneath along with bobbing boat|cable cancelation, etc.

Very similar architectures in many ways - with rolling DSP filters in place of trading response algorithms .. etc.

Lisp -> ASM or Lisp -> C either way code generation from a higher language was a good way to get the heavy lifting done.



Cool project!

I guess when different people try to achieve extreme low latency or efficiency, the solutions start to converge into small number of ideas.


what would you do if you wanna run all this on a web server instead? sorry if thats the wrong question. how does your system interact with say android or ios clients or a webapp with ui


If you have a project that you want to see done, you will be more likely to succeed using some more traditional architecture.

What I described is chasing latency at all costs. The costs are hardware costs, maintainability costs, development costs, inefficiency (yes, a lot more CPU is used than what is needed just to run the critical path fast). This is very extreme situation and it would be very unlikely to be a good tradeoff for your application.

If you have a lot of clients connecting there are different tradeoffs to think about and different possible architectures to evaluate, but I can't help you not knowing what your problem is.


The low-latency core communicates with a more normal app via messages, over a socket or through shared memory or whatever. So you have normal UI code where a user can enter an instruction, then instead of writing to a database or making a HTTP request, it sends a message to the low latency process. That should respond to acknowledge it, and it will send more messages later if it makes any trades etc.




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