STAC Summit, 14 May 2024, New York

A number of financial firms stood up LLM POCs in 2023 and have now moved them into production on a limited basis. Those who have not are mostly planning to do so in 2024. Once a limited solution is in prod, AI architects will face the consequence of their success: demand for more users and use cases. Sessions in this segment of the agenda will explore possibilities and practicalities of supporting AI at scale in 2024.

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

Jack will provide a preliminary look into STAC-AI™, an LLM benchmark suite guided by the priorities of financial firms, which measures a full solution stack -- from the model to the metal™

• Conor Twomey, Head of AI Strategy, KX

Getting large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate and relevant output is a well-known challenge. It’s even more daunting in the fast-moving landscape of capital markets. Trading and investment firms care deeply about the sequence of events and how information changes over time. The key to unleashing the power of GenAI for markets is to integrate source content into a timeseries framework and to enable LLMs to operate on the wealth of traditional financial timeseries that firms already amass. Through practical, high-impact use cases in alpha gen, trade execution, and risk, Conor will argue for a new kind of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that fully leverages the temporal properties of information.

• Speakers to be announced

Banks and hedge funds require more compute, storage, and networking to meet increasing demands for trading and risk analytics. Data volumes continue to balloon, regulations require more simulations, and new market opportunities require new analytics. However, generative AI has famously become a "gravity well" driving the product roadmaps of the major hardware and cloud providers. On the one hand, this may increase the options available for financial HPC and perhaps drive down long-term costs. On the other hand, AI architectures can differ in important ways from those of today's trading and risk analytics, reducing leverage from new products. Sessions in this segment will cover key innovations and how financial HPC can benefit.

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

Jack will present the latest Council activities and benchmark results involving derivatives risk computation.

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

Jack will present the latest Council activities and benchmark results for deep time-series analytics.

• Speakers to be announced

Realtime trading architects have a lot to balance. On the one hand, they must continue to reduce latency by accelerating communications, making software faster, and making hardware smarter. On the other hand, data rates are ballooning, crypto is drawing deployments to the cloud, and compliance, risk, and cyber are competing for technology budget. Sessions in this segment will explore strategies for succeeding at this balancing act and key innovations that can help.

• Dr. Lawrence Der, Application Engineering Director, Cadence

Supporting 25G Ethernet can reduce the latency of FPGA or ASIC algorithms--but only if it is implemented well. Signal integrity, power, and thermal challenges exist all the way from the 25G IP, through the package, and across the PCB. In this talk, Lawrence will explore these challenges and present methods to analyze and resolve them so that you can achieve cool speed with 25G.

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

Jack will discuss the latest research and Council activities related to STAC-ML, benchmarks for low-latency LSTM inference on market data.

• Mike Schonberg, Director of Market Data Technology, Quincy Data

Building a time-synchronization network spanning multiple data centers within a metropolitan area is a formidable challenge, particularly when the requirements include fault tolerance, nanosecond accuracy, and traceability to UTC(NIST). Quincy Data undertook this challenge, using White Rabbit in Chicago and New Jersey to synchronize across the major trading venues and using GNSS to connect these metros into a single clock domain. Come to hear Mike explain some of the problems Quincy encountered in design and implementation and how they overcame them.

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

Jack will discuss the latest Council activities and test results relating to network stacks in the cloud and on the ground.

• Speakers to be announced

Presentations on cloud, bare metal, connectivity, analytics, software, and FPGA ecosystems from a growing list of vendors, including Adaptive, AMD, Blackcore Technologies, DDN, Dell Technologies, Exegy, FMAD Engineering, Hammerspace, Intel Corporation, JETCOOL, Keysight, KX, LDA Technologies, Liquid-Markets-Solutions, Myrtle.ai, NovaSparks, Options, Oracle, Orthogone, Pure Storage, Red Hat, Shengli Technologies and Supermicro.