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

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

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

• Belinda Neal, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
• Venu Mantha, VP of Cloud Engineering, Financial Services, Oracle
• Matthew Klos, Senior Solutions Architect, IBM
• Phil Aronowitz, Solutions Engineer, DDN
• Bob Gaines, HPC/ AI Technical Solutions Architect, Intel Corporation

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 and cloud have famously become "gravity wells" for the IT industry, driving its product roadmaps. On the one hand, this may increase the options available for financial HPC and data-intensive workloads, driving down long-term costs. On the other hand, AI and hyperscaler architectures can differ in important ways from those of today's trading and risk analytics, which presents challenges. To what extent can the finance industry benefit from the new products coming forth? How much longevity is left in existing approaches? Are there opportunities (or even imperatives) for trading and investment firms to rethink how they design their applications and infrastructure?

• Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Eric Powers, Director, Global Head of Markets Technology: High Performance Architectures, Citi
• Daniel Wisehart, Head of Hardware Development, Cubist Systematic Strategies
• Matt Certosimo, Data Center FPGA Field Application Engineer, AMD
• Scott Caudell, FSI Architect, Google
• Louis Liu, CEO, Shengli Technologies

To stay in the game, trading firms must manage ever-growing data rates and keep their architectures competitive, whether it’s making software faster or hardware smarter. But mounting requirements for regulation, compliance, and cyber are straining resources. Meanwhile, finding well-trained talent is only getting harder. What are the best strategies to navigate these constraints? What are the best buy/hold/sell strategies for technologies across the spectrum, from FPGA and ASIC to private clouds? Where does it make sense to buy third-party logic today? Our panel of experts will weigh in.