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Cuttlefish: A Fair, Predictable Execution Environment for Cloud-Hosted Financial Exchanges

Authors Liangcheng Yu , Prateesh Goyal , Ilias Marinos , Vincent Liu

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  • Networks → Cloud computing
  • Networks → Network dynamics
  • Applied computing → Online auctions
Keywords
  • Cloud-hosted exchanges
  • Financial exchanges
  • Computation and communication variances
  • Virtual time overlay

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Abstract

Recent years have seen a rising interest in cloud-hosted financial exchanges. While the public cloud platforms promise a cost-effective and more accessible option to traders, unfortunately, achieving fairness in cloud environments is challenging due to non-deterministic network latencies and execution times.
This work presents Cuttlefish, a fair-by-design cloud execution environment for algorithmic trading. The idea behind Cuttlefish is the efficient and robust mapping of real operations to a novel formulation of "virtual time". With it, Cuttlefish abstracts out the variances of the underlying network communication and computation hardware. Our implementation and evaluation not only validate the practicality of Cuttlefish, but also show its operational efficiency on public cloud platforms.

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Liangcheng Yu, Prateesh Goyal, Ilias Marinos, and Vincent Liu. Cuttlefish: A Fair, Predictable Execution Environment for Cloud-Hosted Financial Exchanges. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 33:1-33:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.33

Author Details

Liangcheng Yu
  • Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA
  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Prateesh Goyal
  • Microsoft Reserach, Redmond, WA, USA
Ilias Marinos
  • Nvidia, Redmond, WA, USA
Vincent Liu
  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

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