STAC Lab - Overview

STAC Lab

Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine calls it “a high-tech drag strip on Wall Street.” We call it home. Located in the heart of the New York financial district, the STAC Lab is the place where STAC performs most of its benchmark projects.* It is also a proving ground where trading firms themselves can put new technologies to the test.

The STAC Lab is a valuable resource for firms who need a faster way to get their hands on new products (often before they are released to the market) or who want to outsource some of their initial technology investigations.

The lab brings together:

• The latest technologies. STAC Lab has a wide range of equipment from Innovation Sponsors and other vendors. This includes the latest processors (hundreds of cores), a variety of InfiniBand and 10 GigE networking products, high-end storage systems, and leading operating systems, middleware, and capital markets applications. For an up-to-date list of products available for customer projects, see the Racked and STAC’d List.

• Trading-environment simulators. STAC Lab has an expanding array of workloads that can be brought to bear on a test system, from high-speed market data to order traffic.

• State-of-the-art measurement. STAC Lab is fully instrumented with STAC Tools, capable of observing millions of data items per second moving through a distributed real-time system while measuring their latency to the microsecond. Because STAC Tools support the STAC Benchmark standards, a customer can choose to base a STAC Lab engagement on these standards. This means the test results can be compared on an apples-to-apples basis with published STAC Reports. Supporting these tools is precise timing equipment that synchronizes servers within microseconds, to each other or to a GPS absolute time reference.

STAC supports a range of engagement models for STAC Lab:

• Hands-on. A customer may simply “rent” specific physical resources for a period of time and perform all tests itself, on-site or via VPN.

• Hands-off. STAC can perform tests according to a customer’s specifications and deliver the customer a private STAC Report.

• Collaborative. STAC and the customer can collaborate on a project, with both parties participating in the hands-on work.

If you would like to explore how to put the STAC Lab to use in your own investigations, send a note to lab@STACresearch.com.