Perhaps nowhere is greater computing power more critical and profitable than in fixed income derivative trading, where some organizations have doubled their incomes by expanding computing resources. These firms require more performance, data center efficiency, workload management and scalability to maximize these resources – capabilities delivered by grid computing. Firms are investing in computing resources that rapidly return profitability to the business and provide a truly competitive advantage.

Rick Jacobson Marketing Director - Financial Services Sector Intel America

Innovative new processor and computing technologies have combined to economically enable grid computing and virtualization, allowing enterprises to reduce physical IT resources and costs, improve manageability and scalability, and improve responsiveness to customers, employees and partners.

Today most data centers are siloed where IT resources are dedicated to individual applications. The goal of grid computing is to use virtualization to create a common pool of shared IT resources, allowing any application to utilize any resource and access any data at any time. Whereas dedicated resources were traditionally provisioned for peak demand for each application, resulting in poor utilization, grid computing enables resource provisioning for overall peak demand, resulting in highly efficient utilization and the ability to support high performance computing applications.

There are several recent innovations that facilitate grid computing and deliver other major business advantages. Virtualization is a key ingredient in making grid computing possible, enabling a single physical resource, such as a server, to run multiple applications and operating environments, increasing utilization. Virtualization allows the integration of grid computing across the IT spectrum – from individual processors to the entire IT ecosystem, which includes third-party firms that supply IT application services on demand.

Once computing resources are virtualized, that opens the door to dynamically assigning any computing resource to any task. Grid computing matches application demand with available resources in real-time to dramatically increase performance and responsiveness.

Financial services firms run compute-intensive applications like Monte Carlo simulations to perform risk analysis. Before grid computing, calculating potential outcomes for each possible scenario was very time consuming since the entire simulation ran on a single sever. This is an ideal task for grid computing because enormous computational resources are required – which can be broken into many individual sub-tasks and then provisioned to multiple computing resources. In this example calculation speed is of the essence to maximize profits. This is just one example of how grid computing can deliver tremendous performance when it’s needed.

Servers with the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5300 series are an ideal choice for grid computing. Powered by Intel quad-core processors with Intel® Virtualization Technology, these servers deliver more computing horsepower while also facilitating virtualization. This helps highly-utilized, flexible data centers to minimize density problems by providing increased performance and utilization while reducing electrical power and space constraints – a significant achievement for the grid data center.

Future servers based on Intel multi-core processors will further minimize density problems while providing even greater grid computing power. Improved responsiveness, increased agility, reduced costs and simplified manageability – these are the benefits that Intel and grid computing can help deliver to your organization.

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Filed under: Issue 3 - Fall 07