INDUSTRY

IBM announced a new series of Grid solutions being deployed by European clients in both the public and private sectors, underlining that Grid computing is now a mainstream technology. Customers report productivity increases and the more efficient utilization of existing infrastructures. Among the examples being announced are the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA), the Institut Français du Pétrole (IFP) and Sal. Oppenheim private banking institute in Germany. ENEA, was looking for increased responsiveness in meeting corporate customers requests to determine the compute power requirement and the feasibility of research projects that would use the compute power of the agency's 11 research centers. The solution ENEA opted was to virtualize geographically-dispersed computing resources using grid technologies to harness and optimize the total compute power resource. ENEA has reported business benefits including faster response times to customer requests and getting projects started, reduced project run time by leveraging distributed compute environments, and an improved image as a leading-edge provider of technology research and development. The technology benefits include a much better resource utilization rate, an increase in the speed of simulations and job runs, and a considerable saving compared to the purchasing cost of equivalent computing power. Failed jobs have been eliminated, and a considerable saving in maintenance costs achieved with minimal time now required for maintenance. ENEA now has the ability to run compute-intensive research on multi-platform environments. "IBM helped us implement Grid Computing. We were able to harness the full potential of our enterprise-wide supercomputing environment and establish collaborative forums that aid in our complex research and development initiatives", said Silvio Migliori, Vice President Scientific Computing, ENEA. IFP wanted to increase the service it could offer to its users and customers to run simulations on its systems for processes including exploration and reservoir engineering, drilling and production, and car engine combustion. IFP is working with IBM on a Grid solution which will optimize IFP's compute resources by integrating most of the hardware platforms into a grid. The technology benefits include better use of the IT system, with an average of 70% utilization. An IBM e1350 cluster, and a single view of the available IT compute resources improves users productivity. According to IFP the business benefits are numerous. Applications are running more reliably due to the use of extended compute environment. There is a very important gain in computing time compared to the previous infrastructures. And more simulations lead to improved quality products (innovative combustion simulations improve engine robustness and reduce pollution), and reduced 'time to market' for new products. "By working with IBM on a Grid solution, we are better able to leverage our IT resources, from servers through to desktops, in a compute grid that allows us to offer substantially greater simulation possibilities to our users and customers ", said Stéphane Requena, High Performance Computing Architect at IFP. Sal. Oppenheim, one of Germany's leading private banks, uses end-to-end grid solutions from IBM and Platform Computing to optimize trading with equity derivates. Sal. Oppenheim is rolling out a grid-based software solution to speed up complex and compute-intensive simulations for optimizing price and risk analysis. With this information, Sal. Oppenheim gets a reliable base for their investment decisions and can keep up its competitive position in financial trading. Sal. Oppenheim is managing a financial volume of more than 61 Billion Euro with about 1500 employees in Europe. In trading, their professionals need to work with large amounts of data to calculate risk and prices, using simulation. With the new grid solution, compute time can be reduced from hours down to minutes. To get the grid solution into production, existing applications are being grid-enabled for a virtualized IT infrastructure, providing more flexibility, speed and lower cost. Sal. Oppenheim is using an IBM eServer hardware infrastructure and IBM Cluster Management Software, together with Platform Symphony software from Platform Computing to optimize their compute resources. The solution was developed with IBM business partner Morse and IBM Global Services. "Our financial trading teams are working in a very volatile and extremely demanding market. The processing of large amounts of data with top quality numerically intensive simulations quickly is the difference between win and loss. With the introduction of the grid solution we believe to be able to fulfill the demand we are getting from the business side. With the grid solution, we will have in the mid-term an IT infrastructure that will allow us to react flexibly and grow as demand grows with acceptable cost", said Arno Radermacher, Head of IT Investment Banking at Sal. Oppenheim. "These innovative solutions show that Grid computing is on the forefront of innovation in both industry and science", said Philippe Bricard, IBM EMEA Grid Computing Executive. "IBM is helping customers to continuously better exploiting their IT infrastructure for a maximum of progress and flexibility."