Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - London

Hollis Beall, Director of Performance Engineering, X-IO Technologies.
With almost 20 years in the data storage field, Hollis has worked in roles from hardware qualification testing, replication solutions design, proof of concept testing, and technical marketing. As the director of performance engineering, Hollis is responsible for benchmark testing, performance data analysis and visualization, and performance troubleshooting. Hollis holds a B.S. in Engineering from Louisiana Tech University.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, Senior Systems Engineer, Exablaze.
Matthew is a Senior Systems Engineer at Exablaze. He's been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 8 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks. He continues to publish widely in the fields of big-data, hyperscale datacenters, networks, latency and network measurement.

Gerd Heber, Applications Architect, HDF Group.
Gerd is an Applications Architect at The HDF Group in Champaign, IL. His interests include constructive and applied mathematics, high-performance computing, and data modeling. He holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University in Greifswald, Germany.

Neil Horlock, Director, Credit Suisse
Neil joined Credit Suisse (then known as CSFB) in 1998, from Financial Times Information where he became a core part of Credit Suisse's Market Connectivity development team and was central to the design and implementation of their in-house European Direct Market Data solutions. Neil rapidly became an SME in European exchanges, protocols and networks and helped grow the products beyond Europe to Asia and from Equities into other asset classes. In 2005, Neil designed and led the implementation of a (significantly) sub millisecond order routing solution for use within the proprietary trading business, a product that still forms the basis of the bank's high performance ultra-low latency trading platform. In recent years, Neil has represented the bank in a number of technology based consortia including projects such as BOAT and Turquoise and is currently part of the Nanostreams research project led by Queen's University, Belfast. Neil is a Director in the Trade Execution Technologies group at Credit Suisse and his responsibilities include oversight of the European Market Connectivity operation, Global Architecture for Market Connectivity, pre-trade risk and Regulatory Reporting functions, he is alleged SME for topics such as C++, market connectivity and the broad spectrum of low latency solutions, is an all-purpose trouble shooter and general-purpose busy body.

Felix Hupfeld, CTO, Quobyte.
Felix is Quobyte’s CTO and co-founder. He heads the engineering team that develops the data center file system – a software-defined storage system that consolidates storage resources into one pervasive server-based storage infrastructure. Before founding the company, he spent several years in Google’s storage infrastructure team and accompanied Google's tape backup system from pre-production to scale. He is also one of the architects of the high-performance file system XtreemFS and holds a PhD in computer science.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Director, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter leads STAC®, which provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the finance industry and facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading financial institutions and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. Prior to STAC, Peter was SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Venkatesh Nagapudi, VP of Product and Solutions Management, Vexata.
Venky has 20 years of experience in engineering, product, marketing and business development roles in storage, networking and compute industries. Prior to Vexata, Venky headed up product management for cutting edge storage at EMC, and datacenter products at Applied Micro. Prior to that, Venky held various engineering leadership roles at Brocade, Intel and startups building networking and compute chips. Venky has an MBA from Haas business school at UC Berkeley, a Masters from NCSU, and a Bachelors from IIT Madras.

Ben Newton, MiFID II Clock Sync PM, Deutsche Bank.
After nearly 20 years of Investment Banking experience Ben has always been at the forefront of technological change. Starting out deep in middleware development, to running low latency for IBM, Ben has tirelessly pursued the agendas of innovation and optimisation. Ben runs a large clock sync MiFID II project for an investment bank.

Oleg Rasskazov, Executive Director of QR Analytics, JP Morgan Chase.
Oleg Rasskazov is an executive director of QR Analytics at JP Morgan Chase. Oleg has spent 10 years in quantitative research at JP Morgan, working on high-performance compute for equities, commodities, and foreign exchange. Oleg has a Ph.D. in applied math focusing in computer-assisted proofs.

Dr David Snowdon, CTO, Metamako.
David is a Founder and co-CTO at Metamako, with his core role comprising product and technology strategy at the company. His role liasing with customers about their needs gives him a unique view into the challenges faced by such firms. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for HFT firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems, looking at and taking advantage of the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Energy efficiency has long been an interest, with ten years spent designing, building and racing high performance solar powered cars in international events. David’s team formerly held the Guiness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Natalia Vassilieva, Research Manager, Hewlett Packard Labs.
Natalia leads a research team at Hewlett Packard Labs developing algorithms and applications for the era of Memory Driven Computing – a new concept of computer architecture by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Her focus is machine learning and artificial intelligence, analytics, and application-driven software-hardware optimization and co-design. Natalia joined HPE at 2007 and served as the head of HP Labs Russia from 2011 till 2015. Prior to joining HPE, she was an Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University and worked as a software engineer for different IT companies. Natalia holds a PhD in computer science from St. Petersburg State University.