2009 Conference Program

8:00 am Registration and Coffee Service in the Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
8:30 am Chairman’s Welcome and Introduction
  • Peter Harris, President, Americas + Editor @ Large, A-Team Group
8:40 am Session 1: State Street Corporation and rPath: Managing Complexity in HPC Environments

Most IT organizations today are expected to provide ever increasing service levels, while also reducing costs and dealing with the escalating complexity of high performance computing environments. This is putting pressure on IT leaders to think differently about traditional processes and management models. Reducing complexity typically isn’t an option, which means that the focus needs to be on automation and rigorous process controls. After all, with proper controls, complexity can be a business enabler. Without such controls, it can be a corporate risk.

During this keynote session, delegates heard from Madge M. Meyer, EVP of global technology infrastructure at State Street Corporation. She discussed how State Street — one of the world's leading providers of financial services to institutional investors — has taken control of complexity.

In a related presentation, delegates heard from Erik Troan, Founder and CTO of rPath, noted Linux expert and former Red Hat executive, who discussed his vision for an automated and controlled approach to deployment and maintenance of complex applications running in HPC environments.

  • Madge M. Meyer, Executive Vice President and Head of Global Infrastructure Services, State Street Corporation

  • Erik Troan, Founder and CTO, rPath
9:30 am Session 2: Role of Technology in the Shifting Sands of Global
Financial Services

Solace Systems CEO Craig Betts discussed how firms can tackle rapidly rising data rates and the race towards zero latency simultaneously. Craig discussed how issues of basic competitiveness extend far beyond the front office, resulting in changing requirements in the middle and back office for both buy-side and sell-side firms as well as market data vendors and exchanges.

Arista Networks founder Andy Bechtolsheim addressed key trends in the high performance computing market that can help meet these challenges, including the issues facing today’s high performance networks, the role of InfiniBand and 10 GigE, and the performance impact of solid state memory on data bandwidth.

  • Craig Betts, Founder and CEO, Solace Systems

  • Andy Bechtolsheim, Founder, Chief Development Officer and Chairman, Arista Networks, and Co-Founder, Sun Microsystems

  • Stephen Neal, Director, Middleware, Barclays Capital
10:15 am

Coffee Service in the Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
11:15 am

Concurrent Sessions:
 
Session 3: Low Latency Infrastructures: Is it All About Performance?

Investment in low latency infrastructures has shown no signs of slowing down, even during the global turmoil of recent times.  In a recent roundtable conducted by IBM, messaging continues to be the “lifeblood” of financial markets, with latency and throughput the top two priorities. There has also been a recent surge of interest in low latency messaging from exchanges, investment banks, hedge funds, and other capital markets firms across the globe as they all seek to manage increasing business demands in terms of speed, throughput and efficiency-- with even major exchanges reevaluating existing platforms.

This panel discussed the latest achievements in performance, as well as other critical factors in selection of a low latency infrastructure, including reliability, consistency, scalability, monitoring, Real Time Analytic Processing with Stream Computing, high performance computing, cloud computing and holistic management.

 Session 4: Workshop - Programming in Parallel

Bank of America/Merrill Lynch's Jeff Birnbaum led this special workshop session on how to leverage multi-core technologies through parallel processing.

  • Jeff Birnbaum, Global Head of Platform Solutions, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch
12:00 pm

Session 5: Conference Luncheon With Panel: “Building the World’s Fastest Trading Network”

This special panel focused on the deployment of a wide area, high speed, low-latency communications network to support advanced trading strategies.
1:00 pm

Coffee and Dessert Service in Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
1:30 pm

Concurrent Sessions:
 

Session 6: Drilling Down on Latency and Performance in Electronic Trading

Reducing latency in market data delivery and electronic trading is a continuing quest for financial markets systems designers, in conjunction with the ever present need to maximize all aspects of performance within trading architectures. This panel looked at where latency hot spots generally occur and examine ways to overcome them as well as exploring ways to boost performance through software application architecture and design, and by leveraging the latest advances in hardware.

  • Peter Lankford, Founder and Director, STAC

  • Ed Briggs, Industry Technology Strategist, Capital Markets Industry Solutions, U.S. Financial Services Group, Microsoft

  • Joe DeSantis, Vice President, Software Development, InterSystems

  • Jarod Jenson, Chief Technology Architect, Sun Solutions, Forsythe

  • Paul Prince, CTO, Enterprise Products Group, Dell

  • Dmitry Zaslavsky, Director, Credit Suisse

Session 7: Clouds in Practice on Wall Street

With the help of an experienced panel from industry and financial services, we looked beyond the hype and discuss real world cloud computing initiatives already well underway on Wall Street.

We asked how is cloud computing shaping financial services and how, in turn, is cloud computing evolving to address the needs of financial services especially in the high performance/low latency arena?
2:30 pm Concurrent Sessions:
 
Session 8: The Optimal Architecture for High Performance Trading – Scalable Low Latency Private Clouds

Today’s low-latency infrastructures are built as niche deployments. Constrained by niche-vendor offerings, customers are not able to build low-latency environments across the enterprise, thus missing out on additional competitive advantage. How can firms implement a pervasive, low latency infrastructure that supports mission-critical high transactional volume applications, while conserving budgets, power and data center space? Answer: Scalable low latency private clouds.

In an environment that fluctuates with the market, it is very important to have deterministic low latency performance under heavy load conditions. A cloud architecture offers resiliency and burstable, adaptive capabilities in real-time while a private cloud offers controllable, deterministic latency. These approaches provide a winning combination for sustainable growth and cost efficiency.

  • Paul Jameson, Global Director, Financial Services, Cisco Systems (Moderator)

  • Tony Bishop, CEO & Founder, Adaptivity

  • Ed Bugnion, Vice President & Chief Technical Officer, Server Access Virtualization, Cisco Systems

  • Dave Malik, Director, Solutions Architecture, Cisco Systems

  • Michael Payne, Vice President, Investment Bank Global Network Services, JPMorgan Chase

  • Dave Shacochis, VP of Research & Development, Savvis

 Session 9: From HPC to the Cloud with AMQP and Open Source Software

People have been performing HPC and Grid computing for years, and many organizations have up to decades of experience in this area. However, as cloud computing continues to gain traction, how will it benefit HPC? And, how will HPC adapt to cloud infrastructure?

Red Hat has been leveraging both long-standing projects in HPC as well as new innovations to build out novel capabilities and infrastructure for customers moving to the cloud. For example, Red Hat Enterprise MRG integrates Condor, which has a 20 year history in grid computing, with advancements like AMQP Messaging, virtualization, and public cloud management. This provides capabilities for everything from moving HPC workloads to and across clouds to building internal and hybrid clouds.

  • Carl Trieloff, Senior Consulting Software Engineer, Red Hat

  • Lee Fisher, Worldwide FSI-HPC Business Development, Hewlett-Packard
3:20 pm Beverage Break in the Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
4:00 pm Technology Showcase Exhibits Closed
4:00 pm Concurrent Sessions:
 
Session 10: Wall Street Looks To The Future of HPC, Low Latency in the Cloud

The intersection of HPC and cloud computing is upon us.  We heard from leading innovators how Wall Street can leverage its investments in HPC as it moves to cloud-based delivery.  Delegates found out what HPC applications will benefit from clouds, and those that will not, as well as how low latency plays in the cloud. And what these technologies mean for the future of HPC, and the bottom line. 

  • Bill Adiletta, President, TekFinancial Solutions (Moderator)

  • Manuel Martull, Senior Director Product Marketing, Fujitsu America

  • Vikram Mehta, President & CEO, BLADE Network Technologies

  • Jason Stowe, Founder and CEO, Cycle Computing

  • David Teszler, Global HPC Technology Director, Sun Microsystems

  • Bob Zak, Senior Platform Architect, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel

 Session 11: Leveraging Hardware Acceleration for Financial Markets Applications

Beyond multi-core architectures, financial markets firms are turning to hardware acceleration - in the form of FPGAs, Cell processors and GPUs - to boost the performance of their HPC applications. This panel provided an update on the state-of-the-art.
4:50 pm

Conference concludes
5:00 pm

Networking Reception Hosted by Cisco Systems
Terrace Room, Lobby Level, Roosevelt Hotel.
Conference and show attendees are cordially invited.
Please wear your badge for entry.