SCIENCE

Platform Computing has reinforced its strategic partnership with Excelian, a leading Murex, OpenLink, Grid and High Performance Computing (HPC) consulting company, to deliver high performance analytics as a new service. Based on Platform Symphony, the world's leading SOA grid middleware, Excelian's service offering enables financial services customers to securely and seamlessly scale compute capabilities for risk and trading analytics without the cost and time required to acquire servers, network bandwidth or administrative staff.

With years of combined experience in the financial services markets, Excelian and Platform Computing have built a high performance, multi-purpose, computational grid infrastructure to enable on-demand, 24x7 analytical calculations for banks and funds of all sizes. The Excelian offering is particularly suited for running market and credit risk analytics, scenario simulation and strategy back-testing, and asset and portfolio pricing and modeling.

For firms with datacentres operating at their space or power limits, the Excelian service is a cost-effective way to increase analytical capacity without incurring extra capital and operating expenses. Platform Symphony's scheduling and workload management software provides Excelian customers with the correct amount of hardware resources when needed with a guaranteed service level at a lower cost than other service providers. As a result, Excelian customers do not over or under -spend on servers, and are not constrained by their datacentre's power and space limits to obtain additional HPC capabilities.

Charles Jarvis, vice president of financial services EMEA, Platform Computing, said: "In times of heightened budget consciousness, IT managers need solutions that provide more compute capabilities without increasing capital expenditure. This partnership between two companies who have a long and established history delivering grid and HPC services is fantastic news for Financial Services customers. It means they can focus on building competitive features for their business without worrying about their infrastructure capabilities. As importantly, the Excelian service provides clients the latest infrastructure technology on a CPU/hour basis, which means customers can move from a fixed to variable cost model, effectively lowering their capital expenditure."

Adam Vile, head of grid, HPC and technical consulting at Excelian, added: "Excelian selected Platform Symphony as the foundation for its analytics as a service offering as we needed an extremely scalable compute platform to meet our clients' diverse compute requirements. We recognized that Platform Symphony has been acknowledged as the industry's most scalable and fastest grid system, taking less than 1 millisecond to orchestrate and dispatch a job. For organizations that require fast risk management, portfolio modeling, and other data analysis, Platform Symphony is the right solution."

Platform's flagship financial industry solution, Platform Symphony operates core risk and analytics systems for many of the largest investment banks and financial institutions around the world. By managing grids composed of thousands of CPUs and optimizing application workloads across shared resource pools, IT departments are better able to support multiple lines of business in response to business priority. By using Platform Symphony, organizations can model pricing algorithms with more fidelity against a broader set of risk factors. This increase in modeling capacity allows firms to have high confidence in their quantification of risk.