IBM, Platform Team on High-Performance Solution
Symphony for Cell will allow financial firms to consolidate data centers
March 24, 2008
Major investment banks are looking at hybrid computing as a way to increase their computational speeds for complex structured products while reducing power consumption and space requirements in the data center.
One leading solution involves combining X86 architecture processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) or Intel Corp. with IBM Corp.'s Cell blades. By pairing that technology with Platform Computing Corp.'s Symphony grid connectivity, financial firms can achieve a five- to ten-time improvement on performance, says Martin Harris, Platform's financial services market director.
Toronto-based Platform says that its Symphony product is the only service-oriented software that supports compute-intensive risk and analytical applications on the speedy Cell. Currently in beta-testing and proof-of-concept trials at several large investment banks, Symphony for the IBM BladeCenter with Cell Broadband Engine will be generally available in the second quarter.
Harris expects that firms will add Cell clusters to their existing systems where high performance and low energy consumption are most crucial. "They won't rip and replace their existing environment," he explains. "This will be an extension to improve their overall performance." The combination of IBM Cell and Symphony will allow institutions to run risk analysis intraday for pre-trade decision support, he adds.
Kevin Pleiter, director of financial services at IBM, predicts that firms will use the technology extensively for equity derivatives, risk management for fixed-income instruments such as mortgage-backed securities, and possibly to handle streaming data such as the Options Price Reporting Authority's feed.
"The beauty of IBM Cell and Platform is you can build it as an appliance, plug it in and go, or fit it in with their existing environment," notes Pleiter. "We are providing the Cell fully optimized, and on top of that firms can layer their in-house code. Platform is how they have their grids built today so this is a natural fit."
Compared to appliances that combine specialized processors such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with X86 processors, IBM and Symphony deliver greater flexibility, asserts Pleiter.
"FPGAs are great when you deal with something that won't change, like [the Black-Scholes pricing model], but this business is about change," he says. "Algorithms are out there for a week or two and then they disappear, but it can take up to nine months to implement and back-test on an FPGA while with Cell we can have a new algorithm up and running in a day. This uses C and C++, Red Hat and math libraries--so it is just another machine which benefits from all the standard elements in the environment and deploys rapidly."
Since the IBM Cell technology is widely used in gaming consoles such as Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 and in medical imaging it has the price advantages of high-volume production--more than 12 million processors have been created.
"This has been engineered as a high-performance chip, not something you are going to run an Excel spreadsheet on," says Pleiter.
Cell is at the core of the Los Alamos Roadrunner supercomputer at the national lab in New Mexico. Roadrunner, which packages into a single unit two AMD blades with a Cell blade in the middle, is expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer once it is fully installed in June. Pleiter says that as a hybrid system, Roadrunner will perform normal calculations on the AMD blades and use Cell for high-performance computations and to balance the workloads.
