An FPGA Based Compression Accelerator for Forex Trading System

In this paper, we propose an FPGA based hardware accelerator for forex trading system. In the forex trading market, the trading volume of currencies is growing larger every year. In order to provide a real-time processing of large volume and high availability service, we focused on the two types of workload, where a bottleneck occurs. The bottleneck between an application server and an internal hard disk is caused by the overhead from storing the transaction logs, due to the bandwidth limitation of a hard disk. Our key idea is to suppress the overhead of transaction logging through the high throughput hardware compression. Compared to software compression, our hardware accelerator scored 6x better performance in compression throughput.