The Era of Experimentation
Vendors must work together to get the most out of HPC, say conference panelists
October 1, 2007
The capabilities of high-performance computing (HPC)--the breathtaking speed, the ability to handle massive volumes of data--often collide with the practical limitations of making the hardware, applications and operating system all work together efficiently.
That's why applying a hybrid approach to Wall Street's HPC needs was a recurring theme at the annual High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York last month. IBM Corp.'s Dave Turek, VP of deep computing, described how people are merging multiple technologies to ramp up their systems to give users the power they desire. It's the "era of experimentation," said Turek. Heterogeneity is here to stay, he added: "Incompatibility is percolating through everything."
But big names are working together, said Nicolas Pintart, head of business management at Reuters, who offered his own company as an example. Reuters is joining with Intel Corp., Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems to more quickly send market data to analysts, traders and brokers while preserving firms' investment in existing technology. The mashing together of computing solutions at investment firms may sound negative, but there are many positives contained in that proposition.
Limitations exist. Machines may have quad cores, but does the software really use the parallelism of the hardware? The answer from conference attendees: not sufficiently. Will the industry ever reach a point where there is a general consensus that data is getting to users as fast as it can? Probably not. "The volume knob doesn't have a top end," noted Brian Theodore, head of enterprise emerging technology at Reuters. You can try to predict how much volume will increase for real-time data feeds, he mused, but tomorrow that volume will double.
The collaboration among Reuters, Cisco, Intel and Sun resulted in a 32 percent hike in messages per second over other published benchmarks, and a record maximum throughput rate of 2 million updates per second on a single Reuters Market Data System process. That rate was reached using a dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 processor with Cisco InfiniBand server fabric switches running on the Solaris 10 operating system; the tests were performed by Sun using standard Reuters test procedures.
New Benchmarks
Data is moving faster and processors and networks are getting speedier, but "customers want vendors to work together," pointed out Peter Lankford, director of the Security Technology Analysis Center (STAC) in Chicago, who lamented the lack of standardized benchmarks for interactions between new technologies and customers' existing systems. In an effort to change that, STAC introduced at the HPC show a new benchmark council that includes Citigroup, HSBC and JP Morgan Chase & Co. among its eight charter members and, said Lankford, is "governed by customers--only customers have a vote."
STAC wants "to demonstrate the business value of all this technology focused on capital markets' execution workloads," Lankford added. And an abundance of business users were in attendance at the conference to demonstrate their interest. Said Jeremy Lehman, global head of architecture, strategy and principal investments at Citigroup, "the head of network design at Citi is here--I don't think you would have seen her at this conference a couple of years ago." Thomas Chippas, North America head of Deutsche Bank's Autobahn Equity trading platform, noted, "I'm a business guy, not a technologist." But not only was he there, he sat on a panel about market data.
