Wall Street & Technology: Blog
subscribe September 17, 2007

News from the High Performance on Wall Street Show

The ongoing slugfest between providers of high-performance computing solutions was evident at the High Performance on Wall Street show today at the Roosevelt Hotel. All the major vendors of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, server grid software, data grid software and other high performance hardware and software are here, providing updates on their solutions and gently dissing the competition. As slugfests go, this is an amiable one and many of these companies are actually working together in pairs and groups (for instance, Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Wombat) to jointly solve issues of data latency and throughput. And Peter Lankford at the Securities Technology Assistance Center said today that it's created a benchmark council made up of Wall Street executives who will decide on benchmarks for all these providers to follow.

Specific HPC product news we found of interest:

- Cisco, Reuters and Sun announced an end-to-end low-latency solution for automated and algorithmic trading that is said to reduce overall system latency by 38%.

- Microsoft and GigaSpaces announced that they have been integrating Excel 2007 with GigaSpaces’ in-memory data grid solution at individual customer sites and will productize a joint solution in 2008. This will help eliminate data latency in such scenarios as research analysts making research available to traders and spreadsheet-based risk management. Each Gigaspaces unit can handle data services such as validate, check/match and execute order at a pace of 1,000 transactions per second and according to Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, and the units are infinitely scalable – two units will process 2,000 transactions per second and so forth.

Excel is ready to run on Intel’s and AMD’s forthcoming quad-core chips, Stevan Vidich said. “Out of the gate, Excel 2007 will run four times faster on quad core for most Wall Street workloads,” he said.

- Teradici showed a demonstration of their remote computing offering and told us that IBM and ClearCube as well as Verari have agreed to resell it and units are in production. That means this interesting solution designed for Wall Street trading floors will be widely available next year. It puts a small device on the trader’s desk that accepts images from a blade or PC in another location (such as a data center) – each unit contains a special chip that compresses and decompresses images for rapid delivery. The desktop device, which was envisioned a few months ago as the size and shape of a hockey puck, is in its current incarnation more like a miniature PC tower, about two inches wide and five inches high. This allows for cleaner workstations that consume less power and simplified IT support, reassignment of PCs, and “waterfalling” – giving the best computers to the most-valued employees and the junk to those least valued. While earlier forms of remote workstations or thin clients were criticized for being limited in the amount of distance they can handle, one customer is testing the product with five kilometers between devices and PCs; according to a Teradici spokesperson the blades could easily reside at a data center in New Jersey and feed devices on Wall Street trading floors or at traders’ homes so they could work from home, particularly helpful in an emergency.

- IBM updated us on their Cell chips. “There are five million chips out there,” said Kevin Pleiter, director of the global financial services sector at IBM. “Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into the development of the Cell.” The Cell chip has been packaged in traditional PC and server blades and is already in its second generation in this format. Its best used on Wall Street to handle core math code, Pleiter says. The third generation will come out in the second quarter of 2008. “Already, the Cell is typically five to six times faster than a quad-core processor,” Pleiter said.

Today IBM announced that the Cell processor can run Red Hat’s Linux operating system. IBM has also been working on a development environment that will allow for rapid development of applications to run on the Cell, this will be generally available next year.

“Most major global banks are working on significant proofs of concept of this, using it to help them process exotic derivatives,” Pleiter said.

- Nvidia showed their new Tesla graphics processor unit, which comes in a desktop PC unit for trader workstations and a server blade for the data center. "This GPU is 50 times faster than a CPU," said Gerald Hanweck, Jr., principal at Hanweck Associates, a consultancy that has deployed the Nvidia graphics chip at several investment banks and hedge funds. Which applications are best suited to this type of specialized processor? "Anything that usees Monte Carlo style simulations, trees or lattices," he said. "This chip is good at pricing large amounts of data, it's useful for options pricing." Some clients are achieving a 100X speedup over single core processing, he said.

Posted by Penny Crosman at 05:44 PM



This is a public forum. CMP Media and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not control what is posted herein. CMP Media makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by its staff members or readers.

Community standards in this comment area do not permit hate language, excessive profanity, or other patently offensive language. Please be aware that all information posted to this comment area becomes the property of CMP Media LLC and may be edited and republished in print or electronic format as outlined in CMP Media's Terms of Service.

Important Note: This comment area is NOT intended for commercial messages or solicitations of business.


CHECK THIS OUT

Make your organization more efficient and customer focused. Visit the Transaction Lifecycle Management Site today!


Featured White Paper
Grupo Santander Uses TLM Reconciliations to Reduce Operational Risk, Boost Efficiency

Events

Live Events:
Advanced Trading's Buy-Side Trading Summit
November 15 - 17, 2009


Marketplace

Career Center


Ready to take that job and shove it?

Function:
Information Technology
Engineering
State:


Keyword(s):

Browse By:
State | City

Techweb
Informationweek Business Technology Network
InformationweekInformationweek 500Informationweek 500 ConferenceInformationweek AnalyticsInformationweek Events
Informationweek MagazineGlobal CIOIWK Government ITbMightyByte and SwitchDark Reading
Digital LibraryIntelligent EnterpriseInternet EvolutionNetwork ComputingPlug Into The CloudDr. DobbsContentinople
space
TechWeb Events Network
InteropVoiceConWeb 2.0 ExpoWeb 2.0 SummitEnterprise 2.0Mobile Business ExpoNoJitter
Black HatGTECEnergy CampCloud ConnectEnterprise Cloud SummitCloud Summit ExecutiveGov 2.0 ExpoGov 2.0 Summit
space
Light Reading Communications Network
Light ReadingLight Reading AsiaUnstrungCable Digital NewsInternet EvolutionPyramid Research
Heavy ReadingLight Reading LiveLight Reading InsiderEthrnet ExpoTelco TVTower Technology Summit
space
Financial Technology Network
Advanced TradingBank Systems and TechnologyInsurance and TechnologyWall Street and TechnologyAccelerating WallstreetBST SummitBuyside Trading SummitIT Summit
space
Microsoft Technology Network
MSDNTechNetTotal IT ProTotal Dev ProTotal IT Pro CommunityTotal Dev Pro Community
space