LightTrader: A Standalone High-Frequency Trading System with Deep Learning Inference Accelerators and Proactive Scheduler

Recent research shows that artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can dramatically improve the profitability of high-frequency trading (HFT) with accurate market prediction, overcoming the limitation of conventional latency-oriented approaches. However, it is challenging to integrate the computationally intensive AI algorithm into the existing trading pipeline due to its excessively long latency and insufficient throughput, necessitating a breakthrough in hardware. Furthermore, harsh HFT environments such as bursty data traffic and stringent power constraint make it even more difficult to achieve system-level performance without missing crucial market signals.In this paper, we present LightTrader, the world’s first AI-enabled HFT system that incorporates an FPGA and custom AI accelerators for short-latency-high-throughput trading systems. Leveraging the computing power of brand-new AI accelerators fabricated in TSMC’s 7nm FinFET technology, LightTrader optimizes the tick-to-trade latency and response rate for stock market data. The AI accelerators, adopting Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) architecture, which maximizes the hardware utilization from the flexible dataflow architecture, achieve a throughput of 16 TFLOPS and 64 TOPS. In addition, we propose both workload scheduling and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) scheduling algorithms to find an optimal offloading strategy under bursty market data traffic and limited power condition. Finally, we build a reliable and rerunnable simulation framework that can back-test the historical market data, such as Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), to evaluate the LightTrader system. We thoroughly explore the performance of LightTrader when the number of AI accelerators, power conditions, and complexity of deep neural network models change. As a result, LightTrader achieves 13.92× and 7.28× speed-up of AI algorithm processing compared to existing GPU-based, FPGA-based systems, respectively. LightTrader with multiple AI accelerators achieves up to 99.5% response rates, while LightTrader with the proposed workload scheduling and DVFS scheduling algorithm relieves the miss rate from 17.1% to 23.1%.

I. Introduction

HFT’s share of US equity trading volumes [20]