New Capital Markets Benchmarking Council

The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) recently announced the creation of a new benchmark council that includes some of the leading securities firms such as JPMC, Citigroup and HSBC. The new council will establish benchmarks in three areas:

Market data

: benchmarks based on workloads such as direct exchange-feed integration, market data distribution, tick storage and retrieval, etc.

Analysis

: benchmarks based on workloads such as trading algorithms, price generation, risk calculation, etc.

Execution

: benchmarks based on workloads such as smart order routing, execution-related messaging, etc.

"STAC Benchmarks will measure the performance of software such as market data systems, messaging middleware, and

complex event processing systems (CEP)

, as well as new underlying technologies, such as hardware-based feed and messaging solutions, hardware-based analytics accelerators, compute and data grid solutions, InfiniBand and 10-gigabit Ethernet networks, multicore processors, and the latest operating system and server technologies."

Benchmarks in complex event processing, huh ? That will be interesting. Will it be based on specific sets of use cases ? Will it give us insight into the hype and myth of the various CEP vendors' proclamations of processing gazillions messages / sec ? Will it tell us what happens when you try to scale these products ? I wonder what the various CEP vendors think about this ...? Some FAQs here.