INDUSTRY

Topspin Communications, the leader in switched computing, and Platform Computing, the largest distributed and grid computing software vendor, today announced a joint partnership which will enable financial services customers to accelerate the performance of resource-intensive capital market applications such as trading, risk, or portfolio management systems. The jointly certified solution allows Platform customers and partners to implement Grid solutions that leverage the network speed of Topspin's InfiniBand-based server switch technology and accelerate trading applications that require high performance in both compute and data intensive environments. Some customer benchmarks have already shown as much as a 25% performance improvement for the combined Platform/Topspin InfiniBand-based solution. Front and middle office businesses in today's capital market firms face an ongoing challenge to keep up with computational requirements of ever-increasing product complexity and ever-decreasing settlement windows. Grid solutions offer the ability to improve computational capability, but are often constrained when access to a large volume of data is needed. In order to address this need, Platform and Topspin have developed a joint solution that allows customers to both deploy Grid-enabled applications and leverage the bandwidth and latency characteristics of Topspin's InfiniBand solution set to achieve virtually unlimited computational capability. InfiniBand technology offers up to 10x more throughput than traditional Ethernet-based solutions with an order of magnitude less latency. The joint Platform/Topspin solution allows customers to simply and quickly run their existing applications over the InfiniBand-based Grid without making changes. Customers can use the "IP over InfiniBand" (IPoIB) standard, or move directly to the Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) standard to achieve even better performance and latency levels. Platform is the first Grid software vendor to have its solution validated for SDP. "In the past decade, many of our customers delivered faster and more accurate compute intensive application performance by implementing Grid solutions such as Platform LSF or Platform Symphony. However, some applications are also limited by their ability to access data quickly enough," said Songnian Zhou, CEO, Platform Computing. "By using Topspin's InfiniBand products, customers can move to the next level of application performance and experience significantly improved data throughput over traditional Ethernet-based networking solutions." Industry analysts acknowledge the natural match for InfiniBand technology and Grid applications. "Increasingly, users are talking about virtualizing their applications and allocating across a resource pool," said John Humphreys, Research Manager, High Performance Computing, IDC. "This not only necessitates the 'grid-enabling' of the servers but also demands fast, low latency interconnects as well as intelligence in the network. Nowhere is this more true today then with compute- and data-intensive applications on the forefront of grid adoption." "By combining Topspin's and Platform's Grid offerings, customers are now able to leverage the efficiency of server switching to achieve previously unattainable performance in time critical applications that demand low latency and very high, sustained throughput," said Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO, Topspin. "It's a perfect combination -- Topspin provides the high performance intelligent backbone for building the Grid out of industry standard servers, storage and networking resources, and Platform adds the ability to dynamically distribute workloads across the CPUs."