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September 25, 2008
Wall Street IT Gets the Message: More Speed, Fewer Dollars
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Do more with less and do it faster. That's a pretty familiar order to anybody running an IT operation these days. But given the recent events in the news, no one is hearing that mandate more than people in the capital markets. At the High Performance on Wall Street conference this week, hundreds of financial services IT practitioners came looking to find ways to meet the demands of business that moves at the speed of microseconds.
The big themes of financial IT -- latency, throughput and power efficiency -- have intensified in the last six months, speakers and attendees at the conference generally agreed. "In the U.S. markets, what we've found is that tolerances have gone down by an order of magnitude," said Peter Lankford, founding director of the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC). "We used to trade in hundreds of milliseconds. It's now to the point where tens of microseconds, if not microseconds, really matter."
So, how to speed things up and stay competitive in a volatile market? How to accelerate and improve the quality of critical applications like credit risk analysis?
"It's a software problem," says Ambreesh Khanna, global head of financial services at Sun Microsystems. "The biggest performance problem going forward is in the software space. Software is not taking full advantage of the processors available today. We need applications that can scale across 10,000 CPUs. Writing software that can scale is the problem today."
Microsoft might not see it as a problem, but would agree that software is the heart of the solution. Company execs were at the conference to promote their new Windows HPC Server 2008 as a way to easily deploy scalable, high-performance applications across clusters. "We're providing seamless scalability from desktop workstation to cluster by letting users take advantage of the power of distributed computing, and in a familiar Windows environment," said Vince Mendillo, director of the Server & Tools Business Group. The new software includes new management and administration tools that simplify configuring and deploying cluster nodes, scheduling jobs, allocating resources and monitoring system health. Advanced failover has been built in to ensure reliability, and "there's very low latency when sending a process from one machine to another," he said.
Ricky Higgins, director of IT at Lloyds TSB, one of the largest banking groups in the United Kingdom, said his group was able to set up a 64-node cluster in a matter of hours. "We've also increased the volume of transactions and reduced processing time by about 50 percent," he said.
Microsoft isn't just targeting financial services with this platform. Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server and Solutions Division, said during his keynote that the launch of the new HPC Server "is just another step in our vision to drive HPC mainstream."
Another step toward that is a partnership with Cray, announced last week, to offer a diminutive supercomputer (smaller than a footlocker), the Cray CX1, that runs Windows HPC Server 2008. Prices start at $25,000.
Red Hat product manager Bryan Che said his company's Enterprise MRG software, built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is going to help financial services companies by integrating high-speed messaging and grid technologies to provide faster response times and scalable resources. "Users can dynamically schedule virtual machines across heterogeneous environments, and if they run out of capacity, they can then go out to, say, the Amazon cloud," he said.
Another Linux provider, Novell, is evolving its SUSE Linux Enterprise to meet the demands of real-time, scalable computing. One technique that will show up next year is "predictive virtualization," said Moiz Kohari, Novell vice president of engineering for financial services. "The software will be able to predict when a task will run and how long it will run. The objective is to provide real-time guarantees to the application running in that process."
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