End-User Driven Technology Benchmarks Based on Market-Risk Workloads

Market risk management is a critical, resource-intensive task for financial trading firms. The industry relies heavily on innovation in technical infrastructure to increase the quality and quantity of risk management information and to reduce the cost of its production. However, until recently, the industry has lacked an independent standard for gauging the potential of new technologies to help. This changed when the STAC Benchmark Council developed STAC-A2, a vendor-independent benchmark suite based on real-world market risk analysis workloads. It was specified by trading firms and made actionable by leading HPC vendors. Unlike vendor-developed benchmarks known to the authors, STAC-A2 satisfies all of the requirements important to end-user firms: relevance, neutrality, scalability, and completeness. Intel has demonstrated the utility of STAC-A2 for comparing successive generations of Intel® Xeon® processors.