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September 10, 2007
When HPC Meets Wall Street
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The High Performance on Wall Street conference takes place next Monday (Sept. 17), and -- as the title indicates -- it will be taking a look at the technologies that are allowing financial services firms to meet the incredible performance demands that have been placed at their feet.
Among the topics that will be covered this year are low latency, hardware acceleration and on-demand applications, and these will be covered from both a high level and a more granular, enabling technology focus. Speaking and presenting on these issues and several others will be representatives from leading vendors like DataSynapse, IBM, GigaSpaces, Appistry, AMD and Intel, among others, and user organizations including Credit Suisse First Boston, UBS, Barclays Capital and Citigroup, among others.
To get a little insight into the IT trends that helped to shape this years conference, as well as to get a little more insight into the financial services market, in general, GRIDtoday spoke with conference chair Peter Harris, who was responsible for setting the agenda. Harris is president for the Americas and editor-at-large for A-Team Group, a research, publishing and consulting company specializing in the field of information technology in financial markets.
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GRIDtoday: What role did you have in planning the event?
PETER HARRIS: I really put together the conference program, so the content of the day is my responsibility. I work with Flagg Management, who is the overall event manager. I work for a company called A-Team Group, and we are a publishing and research company, and we focus on IT use by the financial markets.
Gt: There seems to be a big focus this year on grid computing and similar technologies, such as application platforms providing high availability and low latency. How important has grid computing traditionally been in financial services?
HARRIS: Grid computing over the last five years has really become very much en vogue on Wall Street; Wall Street’s a big user of compute power. A lot of the applications that are run -- analytics applications, portfolio management, risk management -- all require an awful lot of compute power, and the faster you can perform calculations, the more opportunity you have in the market. So, firms have really looked to embrace both high-performance clusters and also grids to a large extent.
Gt: How do companies like Appistry or GigaSpaces, etc., fit into the “grid” market? Are financial firms considering them grid computing, or do they look at these companies in a different light?
HARRIS: GigaSpaces is really a class of grid computing that’s focused on data rather than compute power. GigaSpaces is presenting alongside Microsoft at the event, and I think Microsoft is coming to the party with its high-performance server … which is really about compiling the compute power needed to run applications. What Wall Street has found is that having the compute power is not enough; you actually need to have the data available in a timely manner for the compute nodes to process.
So, there’s this class of applications that is sometimes called “data grids” or “data fabrics,” and they're really about making sure the data is available for the compute nodes when they need the data. GigaSpaces is in that data grid space, and they actually have a joint offering with Microsoft in that area.
Appistry is really more of a virtualization management play. It’s really more about making sure that the applications running within a datacenter -- whether they’re running on a grid or a cluster -- are actually managed correctly, that they’re provisioned to servers at the time when they’re needed with the right software stack, etc.
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