2008 Conference Program

8:00 am Registration and Coffee Service in the Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
8:30 am Welcome and Opening Panel – What’s Hot For High Performance?

Chairman’s Welcome and Introduction

  • Peter Harris, President, Americas and Editor at Large,
    A-Team Group
8:40 am Session 1: Keynote - Scaling Out on Wall Street

Microsoft hosted a session discussing the unprecedented period of volatility the financial markets are experiencing today and how many financial firms are now seeking even higher gains and stronger operational efficiencies, with reduced risk through the use of scaled-out computationally intensive workloads, in order to cope with the recent mortgage crisis combined with an overall weak U.S. economy.

Financial market firms are responding by re-architecting HPC infrastructure not only for better scale and performance but also for increased end-user and administrator productivity. Enabling a new class of parallel applications via SOA, evolving non-traditional HPC applications into parallel mode and taking advantage of virtualization are some of the innovative methods firms have chosen to cope.

Strikingly, ease of deployment and management for HPC environments are climbing up higher on the critical success factor list year over year. This keynote featured a briefing on trends, challenges, opportunities and a real life success stories.

  • Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and Solutions Division, Microsoft
9:30 am Session 2: Keynote - HPC in the Data Center – Trading to Risk, Analytics and Beyond

The coverage of HPC across Financial Services is extensive, from exchange execution venues, through market data, trade matching, analytics, risk and beyond. The appetite is insatiable for faster, and deeper analysis – both for fundamental business processes and competitive advantage through arbitrage. Providing concepts and stretching the envelope is a constant process in FSI – but with it comes the issue of how to asses investment decisions, leverage existing code and applications, build sustainable compute environments. This panel assembled a mix of innovative vendor and client consumer experience and featured a fascinating debate and discussion across the state of HPC in FSI today.
10:15 am

Coffee Service in the Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
11:15 am Session 3: Controlling the Weather: Delivering The Promise Of Cloud Computing

First there was Grid, then Utility and now Cloud Computing. Looking beyond the marketing hype, without climate control and ultimately the ability to control the weather, resistance to cloud computing will slow its adoption by the financial services industry. This would be a huge lost opportunity.

The key to realizing the benefits of Cloud Computing in the enterprise is to implement robust service governance to ensure that it is utilized in a tractable, compliant way, in other words, by enforcing the appropriate operational risk management policies.
12:00 pm

Session 4: Conference Luncheon followed by Coffee and Dessert Service in Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
1:30 pm

Afternoon Drill Down Sessions:
 
Session 5: Enterprise class accelerated analytics on Wall Street - Ultra high performance, Affordable and Green

Analytics infrastructures need to scale as never before in order to compete at a new level, to do more with less, and to improve response time, risk posture and ultimately a firm’s competitive position. Systems must be designed for ultra low-latency, high performance, and power efficiency.

This panel discussion included customers who are meeting these challenges by using the IBM BladeCenter® QS22 with third generation Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.™) technology, IBM System x™ iDataPlex for customers finding limitations in their scale out computing environments, or cloud computing - enabling access to compute resources on an "as needed basis" or the ability to scale beyond the limits of the in-house datacenter.

 Session 6: Applying Hardware Acceleration to Financial Markets Applications

Specialist hardware acceleration technologies and techniques are now being adopted by the financial markets to provide a massive boost to application performance.

But the range of hardware options requires careful consideration in order to pick the best approach for a particular problem. And development tools are often lacking. This panel considered the state of the art, and provided pointers for implementation.
2:30 pm Afternoon Drill Down Sessions:
 
Session 7: Gaining First Mover Advantage with a Low Latency Market Data Solution

Delivering low latency market data to traders and to algorithmic trading systems requires not only breakthrough software and hardware technologies but fully tested and certified solutions that can quickly move from proof-of-concept testing into production use. This panel explored the customer requirements, industry trends, and key architectural building blocks that comprise a break through solution in production use today. Panel participants have partnered together for over a year at a technical and business level to ensure that this is a deployable solution rather than simply a collection of best-of-breed piece parts that "should" work together, and interesting lessons learned along the way will be shared. The question audience members asked themselves at the end of this panel is whether their company can afford not to move in this direction.

 Session 8: Low Latency Market Data Distribution – Software and Hardware Approaches

Trading firms looking to distribute high volume and low latency datafeeds are looking to augment or replace existing software-only platforms with specialist hardware appliances and dedicated accelerators. This session explored the business imperatives for software-only, hybrid and hardware-only architectures, examined where traditional approaches remain the best option, and discussed issues related to performance, implementation, management, datacenter impact, maintenance and total cost of ownership.
3:20 pm Beverage Break in the Technology Showcase Exhibits Area
4:00 pm Technology Showcase Exhibits Closed
4:00 pm
Session 9: Building The Perfect Financial Services Data Center

Financial services firms place extreme performance criteria on the data center infrastructure that supports their line of business financial applications.

This panel explored a range of technologies and architecture approaches that are designed to meet those demands – for speed, reliability, agility and operating cost containment.

  • Debra Goldfarb, President & CEO, Tabor Communications

  • Bryan Che, Product Manager, Red Hat

  • Don Clegg, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, Supermicro Computer

  • Dan McCormick, Co-Founder & CEO, Atrato

  • Dan Tuchler, Vice President of Strategy and Product Management, BLADE Network Technologies

 Session 10: Benefits of Data Center Ethernet for High Performance Financial Services Applications

Silvano Gai, Cisco Fellow led a panel addressing the evolution of Ethernet to support high performance workloads in the financial Services industry. Data Center Ethernet is a set of standard based extensions that provide specific performance benefits for the market data and compute grid environments. Silvano discussed how the specific features of data center Ethernet help customers implement low-latency, high-throughput and highly predictable infrastructures that result in a competitive advantage. Silvano is the author of "Data Center Networks and Fibre Channel over Ethernet".
4:50 pm

Conference concludes
5:00 pm

Networking Reception hosted by Microsoft