We recently returned from another great experience at the High Performance Computing Linux for Wall Street event in New York on April 7, 2014. This year's 11^thannual HPC conference focused on big data, HPC applications, data centers fabrics, cloud economics, low latency and how these technologies are all changing the way global financial markets are evolving. As usual, the industry's top minds from various financial trading firms were in attendance to learn how to gain a competitive edge using the latest innovations in technology.

This year, I was asked to take part in a panel discussion about the evolution of the high performance trading fabric and where we are heading. Our session discussed the newest and next wave of innovations that are addressing scalability, optimizing application performance, enabling event-based dynamic decision-making, enhancing analytics in support of risk/compliance, and taking accuracy to the next level. The top question being asked is, "How can I ensure performance and intelligence in the changing technology landscape?"

The panel was comprised of myself, Raymond Russell, Chief Technology Officer, Corvil and Angelo Preci, Managing Director of Operations, North America Fixnetix. Our panel discussion addressed how trading has evolved, including how:

• Markets are complex and automated trading is mainstream to drive business growth via various business models
• The evolution of Cisco and our partners as we move 'up the stack' to drive relevance beyond traditional networking
• Speed evolves to overall performance with new data sources and need for deeper intelligence in the fabric
• Event driven signals that can affect workload placement to increase application performance
• Integration of hardware and software in some of the fastest risk analytics in the market
• Scalable programmable monitoring solutions to support 10G/40G/100G environments
• Importance of precision timing and clock synchronization
• Insight into how an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in the near future can provide value for certain high-performance workloads with deeper telemetry and analytics through open APIs

Today the Financial Markets industry demands a new level of agility, performance and intelligence in a cost optimized solution. We have witnessed a high-performance trading evolution over the past decade.  Cisco continues to make investments in enhancing data center fabrics that support high-performance workloads for critical applications.

During the event, the team featured demos on various technologies such as Hadoop integration, deeper latency monitoring, congestion and event triggers, Monitor Manager scalable TAP aggregation solutions, Precision timing architectures as well as showing the recently announced 10G/40G Nexus platforms that are designed for data center fabrics supporting high-performance workloads. The success of our open APIs and scripting capabilities has enabled monitoring solutions to become seamlessly integrated by ecosystem partners such as Corvil. We also had Corvil present their correlation engine demo that collects key health metrics from the Cisco Nexus switching platform with an Active Buffer Monitoring solution that delivers comprehensive visibility across the trading fabric, providing better decision making and streamlined operations based on real-time and post trade analytics.

Once again, the conference proved to be meaningful and provided some great topic interaction and discussions between attendees. If you missed the discussion or couldn't attend, please review our panel discussion or visit www.cisco.com/go/financialmarkets.