The High-Speed Arms Race on Wall Street Is Leading Firms to Tap High-Performance Computing
Microsoft Offers 'HPC for the Masses'
In some Wall Street firms, HPC technologies are beginning to seep into new areas. "High-performance computing will come out of the specialty quant shops and into the mainstream," predicts Pete Johnson, SVP and manager of the strategic technology group at Mellon Financial in Pittsburgh.
Microsoft is poised to step into this new market. Although Linux and Unix servers continue to dominate HPC environments in capital markets firms, Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, released last summer, is likely to make an impact because of its compatibility with Excel and other desktop applications. "On our high-performance computing platform, we're trying to ask, 'How do you get more analysis, more computation, more simulation done in a small amount of time?'" Microsoft's Ballmer says. "Our HPC strategy is consistent with the needs for real-time analysis and decision-making on large data sets that's fundamental to automated trading approaches."
Ballmer says an obstacle that keeps Wall Street firms from benefiting from HPC is a lack of standards. "Desktops have been standardized, servers have been standardized, high-performance computing has not been standardized," he says. "That doesn't mean there shouldn't be innovation, but the notion that everybody goes out and rolls their own is next to crazy." Ballmer refers to his firm's CCS as standard, and says Microsoft is working with Intel and AMD to provide the right tools to help developers write their applications to work with multicore processors.
The claim that CCS is "standard" is debatable, however. Windows and the CCS iteration of it could be called standard in the sense that if a particular product is overwhelmingly used it becomes a de facto standard, although it has not been formalized by a standards-making body, notes Gartner's Claunch. But, "In high-performance computing, the overwhelming choice for servers and compute clusters is Linux, which by the same logic would make Linux the more credible standard," he contends. Claunch also points out that several standards exist for HPC, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' (IEEE) Floating Point for storing and manipulating very large or small numbers, and the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) standardization of FORTRAN. "Neither Windows CCS nor Linux are standards in HPC," Claunch concludes.
But with its cluster software, Microsoft hopes to make HPC ordinary. "HPC has always been hidden away from the mainstream," says Stevan Vidich, industry architect for Microsoft's financial services group. "There's been a disconnect between what the front-end user can do on the Windows desktop versus what happens on the back end. Our entry to this market was driven by the needs of our customers, who want to break down the barrier between the back end and front-end knowledge workers who use the Windows operating system. We'd like to bring HPC to the masses so that high performance computing becomes so well integrated it becomes second nature."
Mellon's Johnson says his firm's quantitative analysts have highly specialized skills and employ techniques not generally applicable to "the masses." However, because technology innovations designed for the masses eventually make their way into HPC and supercomputing (for example, IBM is looking at building supercomputers around the Cell processor), quantitative analysts in the financial services industry will benefit from efforts such as Microsoft's.
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