Fair enough. My
Knowledge of what’s on the bleeding edge and mass adoption in algo trading is fairly dated. I haven’t been adjacent to that industry in over 5 years. Even back then there was turnkey ASICS you could buy that would implement the network plus whatever protocols you used to talk to the exchange.
I think the neatest thing that sticks out to me is how logging in implementations of low latency trading applications was essentially pushed to the network. Basically they just have copper or fiber taps between each node in their system and it gets sent to another box that aggregates the traffic and processes all the packets to provide trace level logging through their entire system. Even these have solutions you can buy from a number of vendors.
Funnily, one of the biggest DPDK feature is an API to program smartNICs exactly in that way.