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November 23, 2007

HPC in the Land of 24/7

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

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More businesses than ever are employing high performance computing capabilities to fulfill their mission-critical needs. While many of these companies aren't using traditional technical computing, they still require a level of processing power, networking performance or storage scale that necessitates HPC assets. In most cases, the systems are not being used to produce a single answer or model a specific problem, but rather provide a continuous high performance capability for processing real-time transactions. In this type of environment, pure performance is not enough; marrying HPC with mission-critical computing is the real challenge.

Examples of such businesses include Wal-Mart, NASDAQ, and FedEx, three companies that shared their experiences with high performance computing at a Masterworks session at SC07 in Reno last week. The session was organized with the help of the Council on Competitiveness, an NGO that focuses on U.S. economic competitiveness opportunities and challenges.

NASDAQ -- Speed, Cost and Reliability are Key

As executive vice president of Operations and Technology and chief information officer of NASDAQ since 2005, Anna Ewing has witnessed a rapid transformation of financial market exchanges. Although the industry is now extremely high-tech, it's been slow to become globalized in the manner of most other industries. Here in the U.S., and even more so, in other countries, the exchanges have been maintained and protected as near monopolies by their government benefactors. Today though, the globalization of market exchanges is occurring in parallel with the rapid increase in electronic trading volume. In this environment, transaction speed, data throughput and low latency messaging are the technological features that give exchanges their competitive edge.

The most immediate challenge for NASDAQ is to keep up with the message data as electronic exchange traffic continues to skyrocket. Ewing says the exchange use to double its data traffic every year; now it's every six months. The interconnectedness of the global markets is also stressing the system. Thanks to the near instantaneous transfer of market data, disruptive financial events quickly ripple through the world's markets. In this volatile environment, predictability becomes a real asset and users gravitate to those exchanges where they know the trades can be executed reliably.

According to Ewing , their target is Four Nines (99.99 percent) reliability and they've been tracking to Five Nines (99.999 percent). Immediately after 9/11, the NASDAQ systems remained operational, thanks to a virtualized model and computing resources that were distributed across the country. But a lot of their customers were not nearly so fortunate, either because they relied on New York assets or because the redundant systems they had in place had never been tested, and didn't perform as expected. Because of this and the general chaos of the financial environment, NASDAQ ended up voluntarily shutting down the exchange after 9/11. The lesson for NASDAQ was to include their customers in their business continuity planning and testing.

Because of the ubiquity of Internet applications and recent changes to the market regulatory framework, the barriers to automated trading have lowered dramatically. Achieving low latency market data messaging has becomes a critical feature for attracting traders. At NASDAQ, they're constantly looking at ways for improving the messaging infrastructure to shave time off transactions. Ewing says they now can provide less than a 1 ms round-trip per message. In an effort to shave microseconds of latency from trades, some customers are collocating in NASDAQ facilities to get an edge over their competitors coming through the WAN.

"From a technology perspective, speed, reliability and low-cost are the life blood of our market," says Ewing " On any given day, we will process over two billion transactions at sub-millisecond speeds, at rates of over 200,000 transactions per second."

Because of the rapidly increasing volumes of transactions, scaling their computing infrastructure becomes a continuous process, not something to be addressed every three or four years as equipment becomes obsolete. NASDAQ relies almost exclusively on commodity platforms, along with their own customized software. Using this model, over the last several years they've been able to reduce their cost base by 70 percent.

"There's nothing fancy about our platforms," explains Ewing. "It's the software and network engineering that we perform that is, quite frankly, our core competence -- our secret sauce, if you will."

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