The STAC Lab is a research facility where end-user firms can evaluate new technologies under simulated trading conditions. It contains advanced load-generation mechanisms, precise timing equipment, market data, and test tools pre-integrated with many of the products to be tested.

On the STAC Benchmark Council, Sun will contribute to specifications under consideration by its participating trading firms. The Council is a group of trading firms and vendors who are defining industry-standard ways of measuring latency, capacity, power efficiency, and other key performance attributes of solutions used in the trading process. Announced on Sept. 17, 2007, the Council includes a number of global trading firms such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and HSBC.

Peter Lankford, Director of STAC, said: "Sun products are widely used in the financial markets, and Sun continues to focus on reducing latency and improving throughput in the trading process. We are excited that Sun is supporting the STAC movement as an Innovation Sponsor, and we look forward to helping the industry take advantage of Sun products to improve trading efficiency."

Larry Scott, Vice President for Financial Services at Sun, said: "Sun strongly supports the efforts of the STAC Benchmark Council to establish standard performance metrics for trading solutions. We look forward to helping customers use Sun products to build break-through solutions in the STAC Lab and to benchmark those trading solutions using these established metrics."

As an Innovation Sponsor, Sun is providing the lab with several of its latest technologies, including the 2U Sun Fire X4450 server with four quad-core Intel Xeon processors, the Sun Fire X4600 server with 8 AMD Opteron processors, and the 64-thread Sun T5120 server with UltraSPARC T2 processors and integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers.

STAC has added these servers and other Sun products, including the open source Solaris operating system, to its "Racked-and-STAC'dd" list, the inventory of hardware and software products available for customer projects. Sun will also make available its high-capacity "Thumper" data server, the Sun Fire X4500, for storage-intensive benchmarks, depending on customer demand. Sun will lend its optimization expertise to these projects, leveraging tools such as Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).

Sun's multi-year commitment to the STAC Lab will enable customers and partners to design high-performance solutions using Sun products and to test those solutions using official STAC Benchmarks.