Grid drives rich man's gambling

Posted on 14 Oct 2008 at 12:40

Playing the stock market is sometimes referred to as rich man's gambling. But while the betting sites are flush with the latest servers, investment banks are turning to grid computing to help give them the performance edge.

"Each day we have a whole host of complex financial instruments to analyse and value, so the bank knows how much it's making and losing," David Doherty, a developer working on the credit derivatives trading system at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort, told PC Pro. "In recent years, these financial instruments have become more complex and much more highly traded. The result is that it was taking longer and longer each day to figure out how much each trade was worth. The cost of supercomputers isn't very economical and isn't very scalable."

Consequently, the bank turned to another source of computing power that wasn't being run to anywhere near its full potential - the office computers. The company uses DataSynapse's GridServer software to get to work on the number-crunching while employees' PCs lie idle. "We test all our code extensively before using it to officially report trade values, and we do this on a grid that uses the office computers," explained Doherty. "Every single computer in every office location is hooked up to the bank's network and has a small piece of software installed on it that allows it to communicate with the grid. This software does absolutely nothing until someone logs off their machine or the screensaver comes on while the employee goes out for a pub lunch. At this point, the grid sends it a bunch of files with an executable that is run on the machine."

Yet, while the office PCs are invaluable for testing, they can't be trusted with real trading data. "After testing, these processes are moved onto another production grid. Here the nodes aren't users' machines, but a number of high-performance processors dedicated to number-crunching tasks. This cuts down on the risk of a trade valuation being interrupted by someone who comes back from their coffee break and starts playing Tetris."

Nevertheless, the Java-based grid software still saves Dresdner Kleinwort plenty of cash. "The cost of running the grid is a lot lower than running mainframes," Doherty adds. "If one breaks, it's a few hundred pounds for a replacement, whereas getting an expert to look at a mainframe would probably cost more!"

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Author: Barry Collins