Solarflare turns network adapters into servers

Solarflare, a maker of 10 Gigabit Ethernet server adapter cards for performance-obsessed companies like stock exchanges, hedge funds, and supercomputer centers, is turning its network interface cards into servers, more or less. Solarflare is doing this by adding field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to the NICs and special …

[Crazy Operations Guy]

Why would they limit themselves to speed-of-light?

CERN has shown that Neutrinos travel faster than Light. SO why don't we have grids of particle accelerators and detectors broadcasting data around yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst it's good to see innovation in IT being pushed by business needs (rather than social foibles) I still think that this whole High Speed Trading business needs to be outlawed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlawed

And how would you propose to implement and police that?

Automated trading has been going on for a very long time now and FPGAs have been routinely in the loop for at least the last five years. The current challenge is getting the actual trading algorithms into hardware in a convenient manner, demoting the server to a supervisory / record keeping role. This is really only just becoming feasible with the forthcoming generations of devices with gargantuan gate-counts.