Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on High Performance Computational Finance

Computational finance is an important multi-disciplinary research field. The traditional approaches are falling short, as the volume of data and complexity of the models increase at an astonishing rate. Financial companies increasingly rely on high performance computers to analyze high volumes of financial data, automatically execute trades, and manage risk. As financial market data continues to grow in volume and complexity, and algorithmic trading becomes increasingly popular, there is increased demand for computational power. This is transforming the way that financial markets do business and it offers potential major innovations. Yet, the field is still in its infancy. Only in recent years have we started to see growth in relevant research and in the number of workshops in the area of high performance computational finance. When we organized the First Workshop on High Performance Computational Finance in 2008, we had envisioned bringing together practitioners, researchers, vendors, and scholars from the complementary fields of computational finance and high performance computing. Our goal was to promote an exchange of ideas and research, discuss future research collaborations and develop new research directions. The success of that first workshop motivated us to organize this second edition. Recent events in the world economy have demonstrated a great need for better models and tools to perform risk analysis and risk management. Therefore, we selected risk management as a focus area for the 2009 workshop. We have assembled a diverse program, consisting of three keynotes, one invited talk and five presentations selected from the set of submitted papers. Our speakers come from the financial industry, from computer vendors and from academia. Topics range from management of value at risk to frameworks for market data processing to exploitation of new computer architectures. We are confident that this workshop will help stimulate the research in the area of high performance computational finance.