Intel® Software Network Blogs » Financial Software Industry

A Community for Financial Services Software Development

Aaron Tersteeg (Intel) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:44:48 +0000

It has been too long since my last blog post and I'm sure that your wondering what I've been upto. I have a few project in the works and the first that I'd like to share is the new Financial Services Community that was launched on March 28, 2008. In late 2007 Ajay Mungara starting working with the engineering team that serves the Financial Services Industry to identify a community based approach to share their engineering lessons learned with the online community of software developers. After doing some research it was determined that the developer were interested in Manageability but passionate about performance. Speed was what they needed and optimization for Multi-Core seemed to be a better initial focus for the community. Our peers in Europe has already started to market directly to the business people in Financial Services through the FasterFS web site with the goal of sharing the success of Intel's low-energy consumption and lightning performance but the site does note really address the "hot to" that many developer want.

A few months ago I started working with Sunil, Shuo and George to put together a content plan, identify the right enabling engineers, get some blog posts going and set up a forum to address developer questions. The site is now live with our first batch of content and ideas. If you work for a financial services company or write software for the industruy then jump right into the conversation. Let us know what you like and where we can help. We look forward to your questions and comments.

Welcome to Financial Services Industry Community

Sunil Kulkarni (Intel) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:23:03 +0000

Welcome to The Intel® Financial Services Industry Community (Here in after referred to as FSI Community). Here it is all about power and performance – no matter how you slice or dice it – we in FSI are concerned about doing things faster/ better / accurate than what we did day before and at the lowest possible power consumption. Whether it is about processing massive amounts of data to come up with risk in the market or lowering the message latency by yet another 1 millisecond – it is all about performance. We are a group of dynamic software engineers at Intel® Corporation who are focused on improving – you guessed it – performance of financial services applications for end-users as well as ISVs worldwide. We are also sensitive about power consumption and are constantly giving feedback to our chip architects.

Within this FSI Community you will have access to wealth of information pertaining to financial services application performance improvements, finding ways to measure power consumption and tips and tricks to conserve it. Within the FSI Community – you will see periodically a column “Quick Tips” where you will learn quick tips that we have developed. You will have Blogs on various areas – to discuss your performance questions and power issues. We will host Webcasts on various topics like how to develop faster financial applications, JAVA Performance or Power management. You will also learn about Intel Architecture tips that will help you achieve performance – you never thought you could. You will also get chance to get good understanding about various technologies that matter most to FSI like Virtualization, Data Center Consolidation, Grids and manageability. You will get pointers for access to some of Intel’s tools like highly optimized Intel Compiler, tools to parallelize your applications or profile your applications to determine where your application is spending the most time. You will have access to worldwide financial services happenings, events info, newsletters like FasterFS. Blogger's from FSI team will introduce themselves with their areas of expertise.

Overall this community’s effort is to bring all of us in FSI to come together. This is your FSI community. As we contribute to it, we also hope you will contribute in this effort to make it successful. So, join us and be part of Intel’s FSI Community – share your views and learn a lot from each other. Always think about performance – what you can achieve with Intel® Architecture and Intel® Tools - have a great performance!

Sunil Kulkarni
Sr. Software Engineering Manager
Worldwide Financial Services Engineering
Software & Solutions Group
Intel® Corporation

The FSI Community and The Need for Speed

George Raskulinec (Intel) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:05:28 +0000

Hi. My name is George Raskulinec and I’m part of Intel’s FSE engineering team that supports financial customers in their quest to develop high performance software applications. In a prior lifetime I developed software for the computer telephony industry and was keenly aware of customer performance concerns. I‘ve been down in the trenches and understand software development and the tremendous effort involved. (I even have one or two scars to prove it). Computer Telephony and Financial customers have some common ground; they both have a need for speed; perhaps more-so in the financial community.

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Top500 and Windows-based HPC

Shuo Li (Intel) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:08:48 +0000

Almost two years after Microsoft entered into HPC market with its Windows Cluster Compute Server 2003, it is ready to announce a follow up product and rebrand it as Windows HPC Server 2008. In last week's Microsoft Financial Developer's conference, Microsoft further demonstrated how Windows-based HPC is a viable solution for performance demanding financial service industry. Almost 1/3 of the total presentations were directly or indirectly related to building Financial HPC applications on this new Windows platform. What's impressed me most is Microsoft's effort to get their Windows-based platform recognized in HPC industry organization such top500.org. In one of the presentation, the author demonstrated how to optimize an existing top500 entry to achieve 30% percent higher performance and ascend the ranking from position 106 to the equivalent of 75.

Hardware Configuration The Microsoft Rainier cluster is designed to be a scalable test bed built with Dell PowerEdge 1955 blade servers on 256 nodes and 2,048 cores running at 1.8Ghz. The connection is CISCO infiniband. Microsoft built it in early 2007 to test high-performance software products. The Rainier cluster is housed at a Microsoft data center in Tukwila, WA.

Linpack Benchmark The Top500 project tracks of high-performance computing (HPC) trends with one and only one benchmark: Linpack. Twice each year, the project assembles and releases a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, as measured by the Linpack benchmark. For the Rainier cluster, Microsoft used a Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 add-in to submit and track jobs.

Performance Ranking The Microsoft Rainier cluster achieved 8.997 TFLOPS and a ranking of 106 on the list. Using the same cluster hardware and pre-release Windows® HPC Server 2008, Rainier delivered a Linpack benchmark result of 11.75 teraflops (TFlops), performance comparable to that of clusters ranked at 75 on the Top500 List of June, 2007.

Optimization tricks Microsoft didn't give a complete breakdown of 30% performance improvement on different optimization and fine tuning tricks and tips. But what they did tell audience is that they have tried Intel Compiler 10.1 and Intel MKL library 10.0.

Conclusion Microsoft has brought high performance computing to Windows users community. With its unique strength in MS Office applications, high performance computing can be seemlessly integrated with rich client applications such as MS Excel. As of today March 15 2008, 6 of the top500 supercomputer deployments already adopted Windows HPC platforms. Intel's Compiler and MKL library, combined with Microsoft's Platform efficiency, can help improve the performance by as much as 30%, which represent a non-trivial ranking boost on your top500 list.