"When you bring the researchers and practitioners together both learn a lot," said Dan Pitt, a member of the steering committee for the event now in its seventeenth year.

Wall Street traders have become leading drivers in the quest for the fastest, lowest latency networks, a phenomena described as high frequency trading in a recent New York Times article. "Latency across a volume of trading has become the biggest problem for Wall Street for legal and technical reasons," Pitt said.

Wall Streeters hope bringing the conference to New York will help highlight some of their technical concerns. For example, financial systems typically use TCP/IP and multicast protocols while leading-edge researchers more frequently use the message-passing interface.

The program includes new disclosures and performance measures of both quad-data-rate Infiniband, 10 Gbit Ethernet and low-latency versions of Ethernet in the works sometimes referred to as data center or converged Ethernet

The gap between Ethernet and Infiniband is narrowing with the latest research showing Ethernet designs of a microsecond or less latency between hops, said Fabrizio Petrini, a technical program co-chair and an IBM researcher. "There will be a lot of talk about converged Ethernet this year--it's a big topic," said Petrini.

The program also includes a number of papers on the future of on-chip and optical interconnects. Credit Suisse is acting as host for the event.