ENGINEERING

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC) and ASPEED Software Corporation have successfully modeled pricing and risk for callable bonds on Windows Server 2003 clusters with near-linear scalability. By tapping the advantages of Microsoft's .NET framework together with dynamic load balancing from ASPEED, clients are now able to seamlessly exploit the advantages of Windows- based, high-performance computing from industry applications such as Excel. "As financial services firms extend value-added analytic services to their client base, realtime load balancing becomes a critical enabler," said CTC Director Thomas F. Coleman. "We recognized that ASPEED, with its high- performance computing middleware, had the potential to provide capabilities especially important to the financial services industry. This need is greater for firms with multiple operating systems and platforms plus a large number of users who want to access risk and pricing simulations via Web Services. We are pleased to work with ASPEED to offer solutions for the computationally intensive applications that Wall Street needs to remain globally competitive." CTC ported ASPEED's ACCELERANT application to the .NET environment with Web Services, capitalizing on the software's easy-to-use connectivity for migrating sequential applications to a distributed parallel environment. This enabled a very complex, single-thread, computationally intensive application to run in parallel across multiple processors and distributed nodes. According to Kurt Ziegler, EVP of Development for ASPEED, "we are thrilled to collaborate with CTC given their unique expertise in Windows and .NET-based high-performance computing. Their leadership in financial engineering using large, multimode .NET and Web Services clusters is unmatched. This makes them an excellent resource for expanding the ASPEED offering into the .NET and Web Services world."