Citadel Securities runs workloads up to 4x faster with Ironwood
Summary
This short customer story features Citadel Securities describing their partnership with Google Cloud to build a high-performance, cloud-based quantitative research environment powered by Ironwood TPUs. Citadel Securities, one of the world's largest market makers, trades over half a trillion dollars per day across global markets. A representative emphasizes that in financial markets, speed is measured in nanoseconds, and that the firm connects pension funds and individual retail investors alike to help them meet their investment objectives.
To support the scale and speed demands of their quantitative research operations, Citadel Securities worked closely with Google Cloud on TPU optimization, achieving workloads that run two to four times faster at 30% lower cost compared to their previous infrastructure. The Ironwood TPU architecture enables Citadel Securities to run thousands of parallel chips for a single workload, dramatically compressing research timelines. Tasks that previously took weeks or days can now be completed in hours or even minutes.
A key aspiration articulated in the session is empowering quantitative researchers to test all of their ideas without being constrained by platform scale or economics — the only limiting factor should be their own creativity. The session closes with a Google Cloud representative characterizing the collaboration as "steel sharpens steel," underscoring the mutual benefit of the partnership.
Key Takeaways
- •Citadel Securities achieved 2–4x faster workload execution and 30% lower cost by migrating quantitative research to Google Cloud's Ironwood TPUs.
- •Ironwood TPUs enable thousands of parallel chips per single workload, compressing research timelines from weeks or days to hours or minutes.
- •The goal of the infrastructure investment is to remove platform and economic constraints so quantitative researchers are limited only by their creativity.
- •Deep collaboration between a cloud provider and a financial firm on hardware optimization (TPU tuning) can yield substantial performance gains beyond standard deployments.
- •Cloud-based research environments can meet the nanosecond-level speed demands of modern financial markets while improving cost efficiency.
Transcript
We trade over half a trillion dollars per day. But it's not just about volumes. It's also about speed. In financial markets, time is measured in nanoseconds. We connect markets all around the world, whether pension funds or somebody doing their first trade as part of their retirement meet their investment objectives. We've partnered with Google Cloud to build what we think is the pre-minent scalable cloud-based research environment. For instance, we've been working in depth on TPU to ensure that...
