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The whole field of transmitting the high-frequency trading information seems to be going away in favor of FPGA's sitting right on the fiber leaving Wall Str.

          ftp://ftp.bittware.com/documents/data_sheets/ds-hft.pdf

By putting these sorts of devices directly on leased connections from the stock market, adjacent to the stock market, they eliminate the need for the extremely expensive and often quite unreliable remote high speed connections. I was recently privileged to hear a presentation on the risks of data loss on those lines: they're apparently using multicast for high speed synchronoous transmission, But by the time you've checksummed and re-assembled your data and re-collected the lost packets, it can actually be _slower_ than normal TCP, and the the data verification technologies are often poorly tested.

The key to using the FPGA's is to tune and simplify the models that are stored and processed locally, in place of the expensive remote data centers. And updating those devices doesn't require the low latency and high speed: the analysis of stored data and updates of models can be done remotely and much more slowly.

The screamiest servers are now FPGA based.

I've got one of these on my desk as I write. I've actually been working with it for several months now, and it's pretty sweet. It's intended to be a DSP co-processor coupled to an FPGA. The company I work for (BittWare) has invested heavily in Adapteva, and we are introducing some boards featuring a handful of 16-core Epiphany chips (which we have rebranded as "Anemone") and an Altera Stratix 5 FPGA.

The tools are Linux-only at this point, but that's more than OK by me. I think this is the first time I've ever not been forced to use Windows to develop code for a new processor.

The target application is anything that requires lots of DSP but can't burn many watts.

</shameless plug>

"Those DSPs you mention aren't CPUs, and they're not available on PCI cards"

Since when (on both counts)?
DSP == Digital Signal _Processor_ which is the Central Processor Unit on several platforms I know of.

http://www.signalogic.com/index.pl?page=m44
http://www.bittware.com/products/type/dsp-pci.cfm
http://www.innovative-dsp.com/products/delfin.htm
http://www.innovative-dsp.com/products/toro.htm
http://www.globalspec.com/FeaturedProducts/Detail/ InnovativeIntegration/CONEJO_64_bit_PCI_DSP_Card/1 1265/0?fromSpotlight=1
and my fav:
http://www.signatec.com/products/dsp_PMP1000_paral lel_digital_signal_processing_PCI_board.asp
For the record I'm waiting for the signatec to be available as a PCIe x16 card. As it is I have to sneak time on it for transcoding...
-nB

Coming from the embedded world, there are a lot of nifty boards available in the PMC form factor. It's bigger than pcmcia and not hot swapable, but it offers comparably much more connector area (such as a dongle-less SCSI 68-pin connector, or 4 RJ45 connectors) in a size that will still fit many power-user-type laptops. I wouldn't want to replace pcmcia, but it would be handy add-on. Some examples

Quad DSP processors .. an extra 2.4 GFLOPs in your laptop
Fibrechannel, Video, reconfigurable FPGA coprocessors, an Alpha processor
8 serial ports

And of course, T1 interfaces, analog, parallel, dual ethernet, and many more custom functions. And, for designing your own custom boards, the package height and case restrictions are a lot easier with PMC than pcmcia.

Something like this might be better for you, because this SETI one only allows one card per system. There are tons of cool PCI processor boards out there, if you have the money to get them, and the talent to code them to do what you want.