High-Performance Computing

 

HPC: Faster, Cheaper and Easier to Use

More efficient compute power helps firms deal with greater complexity

BY TOM GROENFLEDT

Where Do Firms See Demand for HPC?

In 2003, one of IBM Corp.’s Wall Street clients was doing a sin-

gle collateralized debt obligation per week, according to Kevin

Pleiter, director of financial services at IBM, because that’s all

its computing infrastructure could handle. With high-perfor-

mance computing (HPC) it now does 50 a week.

“As HPC matures on Wall Street, the opportunity to start com-

pressing the time it takes to do deals becomes increasingly important,”

says Pleiter. More and more complex transactions are being executed

“as innovation in technology is driving innovation in new instruments.”

New technology reduced a 26-hour processing cycle to 13 hours and HPC brought that down to an hour, he adds.

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Source:Microsoft Corp.and KRC Research survey

Multicore Ups the Ante, Now Developers Must Catch Up

BY TOM GROENFELDT

Once the preserve of Cray supercomputers, financial firms are applying high-performance computing (HPC) to areas such as pre-trade risk analysis, thanks to relatively inexpensive multicore processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel Corp.

Until recently, firms haven’t been able to measure risk fast enough to support trading decisions, says Neil Bartlett, CTO of Toronto-based Algorithmics, a leading risk management software vendor owned by Fimalac, which is also the parent of Fitch Ratings. “In the last year we have seen the front office wanting to measure risk in the same way as the middle office,” explains Bartlett. “That is just now possible because modern hardware can do it in

a cost-effective manner. Technology has reached the stage where you can do it for $100,000, which is a number the front office likes to hear.”

Fifty-one percent of financial services firms are seeing internal demand for HPC to perform real-time risk analysis in the front and middle offices, as well as in portfolio-related calculations, according to a recent survey sponsored by Microsoft Corp. and conducted by KRC Research.

Such capabilities are possible due to next-generation HPC innovations like data fabrics that avoid delays in moving information in and out of databases; grid com-

puting; data caches on chips to store information locally; specialized processors from companies like Invidia, XtremeData and Altera Corp.; cell processing technology

developed by IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba; and high-speed connectivity such as InfiniBand. Depending on the task at hand, new high-performance computing deployments use a variety of technologies.

Multicore processors, ^{Kevin Pleiter} however, are likely the most important advance. In 2005, while Intel was focusing on high-speed single processors, AMD launched its dual-core Opteron, which provided higher speeds and lower energy consumption than Intel’s

offerings, although the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip-maker quickly caught up. Now multicore has become the standard.

But one development that has largely been overlooked, according to Ambreeh Khanna, chief technology strategist for financial services at Sun Microsystems, “is that the smallest system a commercial customer buys is two sockets, and it is very

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IN THIS REPORT

Before adopting cloud computing technology, financial firms may want to find out where their files will be stored and how access is controlled.

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