Global STAC Live, Spring 2021

• Nikhil Singhvi, Managing Director of Core Trading Technology, Credit Suisse
• Andrew Hillier, Co-founder & CTO, Densify
• Brian Kelly, CEO & Founder, CloudGenera
• Asaf Ezra, CEO, Granulate
• Matthew Cretney, Head of Product Management, Beeks Group

While freedom to choose is generally a good thing, the dizzying array of choices a technologist faces when moving a workload to the cloud is often a significant impediment to migration. The choices start at a high level (private, public, or both? DIY, single-provider, multi-provider, or some combination?). Then comes the tooling (use cloud-specific tools or third party options that promise portability?). And beneath each of these choices are dozens of competing options at successive layers of the stack. What’s more, the choices don't end once a system goes live because use cases and cloud offerings continue to evolve. How do you maintain efficiency while optimizing for performance and price? It can be overwhelming, but our panel of experts will help you keep your head above water. To kick off, some of the panelists will provide a short presentation:

• Jeffrey Luszcz, Director of Open Source Technology, PEAK6

Most financial firms realize that code from outside the enterprise permeates their own. But during a career auditing open source usage, Jeff Luszcz has actually put numbers on it: about 95% of all codebases contain open source and 90% of all open source usage is unknown and untracked. How should senior tech leaders get an understanding of their organization's use of open source? How do you ensure a safe software supply chain without adding friction to the development process? What are the best practices for contributing to projects without leaking IP? As Director of Open Source at PEAK6, Jeff spends his days answering these very questions. Join us as he shares ways to further the benefits of open source while reducing its risks.

• Peter Nabicht, President, STAC

Peter will present the latest benchmark results for fast data stacks and provide and update on the FPGA Special Interest Group.

• Mike Schonberg, Director Market Data Technology, Quincy Data

“Build versus buy” is the question many teams set out to answer when first applying FPGA to a workload, but the answer is rarely so simple. Since third-party products seldom meet 100% of a firm’s requirements—yet every delay in deployment means unrealized profit—firms must blend off-the-shelf components with custom logic. But how should a manager draw the line between them? And what does that decision process look like? Using Quincy Data's first FPGA product as a working example, Mike will walk through an evolution from purchasing off-the-shelf offerings to outsourcing custom-made solutions to hiring an FPGA dev team. Along the way, he'll cover how each approach is necessary, point out lessons learned, and explain how an in-house team allows Quincy to blend custom IP with purchased components to deliver a better product.

• Jeffrey Ryan, Quant at Large and R contributor (e.g. quantmod and xts)
• David Cohen, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation
• Glenn Wright, Systems Architect, KX

Exogenous shocks–everything from tweets to pandemics to Reddit posts–shift markets, disrupt profitable strategies, and alter risk profiles. Firms that adapt to changing market dynamics survive; those that do so the fastest thrive. In order for alpha generation, risk management, or surveillance to be agile, the supporting research platform must allow a firm to search for signals or anomalies across historical and live data extremely quickly and to test algorithm changes just as fast. But this is easier said than done. How are systems today bridging the divides between live, recently live, and historical data? How well can platforms combine batch processing and streaming analytics? What is the impact on research and production workflows? How does this change the role of the quant? Once a platform enables quants to see the full picture, can it also help them avoid problems like overfitting or bias? Our panel of experts will discuss these questions and more. To kick off, some of the panelists will provide a short presentation:

• Peter Nabicht, President, STAC

Peter will present the latest benchmark results from software/hardware stacks for historical time series analytics and provide an update on streaming analytics benchmarks.

• Phil Vachon, Security Architect, Office of the CTO, Bloomberg

Data is the lifeblood of the financial services industry. Critical workflows and personnel need immediate, low-friction access to data from multiple locations and devices. At the same time, data is also an enormous risk. Financial firms must control data access in order to comply with regulations and contracts and to protect their IP. How should data architects work within security policies to ensure that access is both easy and controlled? How can they keep up with constantly evolving data sets and security requirements? Bloomberg has deployed SPIFFE, an open-source technology in incubation at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to simplify and streamline access to data while making security controls easy for developers to manage. Using his experience with this project as a jumping-off point, Phil will introduce SPIFFE and explain how it keeps data flowing where it should and not where it shouldn’t.