HPCwire: Platform Computing Bullish on Financial Services Business

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March 16, 2009

Platform Computing Bullish on Financial Services Business

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

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When Platform Computing formed its financial services business unit in May 2008, it probably didn't know that within six months the financial industry would begin to implode, bringing much of the global economy down with it. Now that some of the biggest investment banks are just scrambling for survival, will Platform's new focus on Wall Street pay off?

According to Jim Mancuso, Platform's general manager of the new business unit, that answer is yes. "It's not to say that everything is perfect and rosy and we haven't been impacted," he says, "but it is to say our business is still growing and we actually have had some really good results in the last quarter and moving forward."

Unless bartering becomes the new model for financial transactions, investment banks, insurance companies, and hedge fund firms are still going to be running HPC applications to keep their financial services running smoothly. Of course, demand for some of the more creative investment vehicles like the infamous credit default swaps and subprime collateralized debt obligations, is going to fall by the wayside, but investing won't evaporate and neither will the need for financial analytics.

Mancuso sees plenty of opportunities to sell Symphony, the company's grid middleware software aimed at the financial sector. From his perspective, what Platform does for a living -- namely speeding up performance and increasing hardware utilization -- enables companies to do more work for less money. "It's very much in line with why people buy anything today," he says.

One of the things Platform has going for it, even as IT budgets get scaled back, is that grid middleware enables Wall Street firms to derive more compute capacity out of their existing resources. Symphony is a workload scheduler that can be used for an array of financial analytics applications. Unlike Platform's batch-oriented LSF offering, Symphony offers a service-oriented architecture (SOA) model that the financial industry has come to accept as a more natural way to deploy services. The middleware is designed to spread compute-intensive workloads like real-time pricing, value-at-risk, and Monte Carlo simulations across a compute grid. But really, almost any type of financial application -- risk, pricing, indexing and analytics -- is fair game here.

"You'll even see large Excel spreadsheets running under Symphony," notes Mancuso. He's seen some really large spreadsheets that were taking three days to run on individual servers. By distributing the calculations across a server grid, execution times were reduced to three hours.

The company's decision to form an independent business unit for financial services was a result of the importance of this particular vertical market to the company. According to Mancuso, the financial services sector is the number one growth vertical for Platform. Even in times like these, when every week seems to serve up another helping of bad economic news, Mancuso reports that he continues to see a lot of demand for services in the financial industry. And the company is even looking to expand its reach beyond some of the big investment banks into firms managing hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance.

As part of the renewed commitment to the financial sector, Platform brought David Warm on board as the CTO of the new business unit. Warm, who joined the company in December, is a Wall Street veteran with over 20 years of experience in the industry, including stints with Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase. Much of his work on Wall Street, was in the area of client service delivery, essentially designing and packaging infrastructure solutions for these firms. As such, Warm brings street smarts to Platform's financial group and helps fill a gap in subject matter expertise.

Platform's latest release of Symphony (version 4.1) reflects some of the ways the company is continuing to refine its approach to grid-friendly financial analytics. The updated middleware has a number of scalability and security enhancements, but the main additions are centered on improving data management. Since the size and unwieldiness of market data can easily slow down financial apps, optimizing the way bytes are sent through the grid's network can produce some significant speed-ups. The whole idea, says Warm, is to squeeze as much of the latency out of data I/O as possible.

For example, the newest Symphony version adds something called Direct Data Transfer (DDT), which allows the client's application data to be accessed directly by the service, without having to be sent through the middleware itself. "You can carve off additional milliseconds of time," explains Warm, "which may not sound significant, but when you're running tens of thousands of large tasks on a grid, it can be very significant." He says they've seen 50 percent savings in data transfer times using the DDT facility, and as data sizes grow, those savings would get even larger.

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