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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 29, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 39
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Applications:
IBM ANNOUNCES GLOBAL GRID
COMPUTING PROJECTS
IBM announced a series of Grid projects around the world as part of its
industry leading Grid computing program.
In addition, together with business intelligence software provider SAS and
other partners, IBM introduced new Grid-based product offerings that address
the unique, compute-intensive needs of the banking and financial markets
industry. IBM also announced agreements with new Grid middleware partners
Avaki and United Devices.
These developments further demonstrate the rapid emergence of Grid
computing
as a viable alternative for the most demanding and sophisticated commercial
enterprises.
Among the Grid projects announced today by IBM:
- Morgan Stanley -- IBM has been working with Morgan Stanley to migrate
analytical applications to run across a grid of Intel processor servers
resulting in a marked reduction of processing time. "IBM has demonstrated
significant performance improvement in a financial analytics application that
runs across a Grid of several hundred Intel processor-based machines," said
Richard Anfang, managing director at Morgan Stanley. "Morgan Stanley continues
to pursue advanced distributed computing models as part of our strategy to
further improve the flexibility and utilization of our computing assets."
- Hewitt Associates -- IBM worked with Hewitt Associates, the global
outsourcing and HR consulting firm, to build a Grid, Linux and WebSphere-based
solution for the company's pension modeling application. The solution features
IBM eServer zSeries mainframe and BladeCenter technologies working in tandem
with DataSynapse's GridServer software. On the Grid, Hewitt reduced its
transaction costs by some 90 percent, without rewriting their
applications.
- NLI Research Institute -- The NLI Research Institute, a company of the
Nippon Life Insurance Group, recently began a joint research project with
IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory to reduce processing time for the company's
financial risk management solution using Monte Carlo simulation through the
use of Grid technology. Early results have reduced processing time from ten
hours to 49 minutes.
IBM also has Grid computing projects underway at Singapore's Ngee Ann
Polytechnic, one of the country's leading institutions of higher learning.
Ngee Ann is the first polytechnic in Singapore to implement Grid computing,
allowing staff and students to share data and processing power; at Germany's
T-Systems, a unit of Deutsche Telecom, for the development of a Grid
Demonstration Center at T Systems High Security Datacenter in Frankfurt to
enable Grid computing in commercial enterprises; and at IN2P3 (Institut
National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules) where IBM and
IN2P3 are deploying Grid Services using the Globus Toolkit 3. IN2P3 and IBM
also are using Grid technology to support Life Sciences Research and to better
manage peak requests for data on the IN2P3 system.
"Leading customers in the financial services, banking, automotive,
telecommunications and education industries are putting Grid computing to work
to address their most mission critical business challenges," said Tom Hawk,
general manager of IBM Grid Computing. "Increasingly, our commercial customers
around the globe are turning to Grid technologies to help them improve the
utilization, responsiveness, and reduce the cost of their IT assets."
New Financial Market Offerings
In addition, continuing its commitment to developing Grid-based solutions
that
address the specific needs of vertical industries, IBM introduced two new
offerings for the financial services industry:
- The IBM Grid Offering for Analytics Acceleration: Customer Insight in
Banking -- IBM and SAS introduce a new Grid offering for Customer Analytics in
the Banking industry. IBM utilized the SAS Credit Scoring application as part
of the SAS Banking Intelligence solution to show that applications can be
readily Grid-enabled. SAS was able to "plug and play" into the Grid
environment without customized programming. The offering enhances a bank's
competitiveness by accelerating its customer insight applications, reducing
its cycle time for executing statistical models, and providing more
sophisticated analysis and increased accuracy of customer acquisition and
retention. In addition, SAS provides a wide range of solutions for Financial
Markets that address compliance, fraud detection and other risk management
functions.
- The IBM Grid Offering for Risk Management and Compliance: Capital Markets
and Retail Banking -- This offering, developed in conjunction with
DataSynapse, is designed to help risk managers implement a Grid infrastructure
to support real-time credit limit monitoring. Currently, many of these
applications are run overnight. The offering can also form the foundation for
a credit risk application infrastructure that complies with Basel II and can
help financial firms to comply more efficiently with the Patriot Act,
Sarbanes-Oxley Act and NYSE Rule 92. Because a company's existing
infrastructure does not need to be replaced, firms can leverage their existing
capital investments while moving to a higher-performance, lower cost,
standards-based solution.
Grid Partner Agreements
Separately, IBM also announced Master Relationship Agreements with Grid
middleware providers Avaki and United Devices. Avaki, of Burlington, Mass., is
a provider of enterprise information integration software based on Grid
technology. United Devices of, Austin, Texas, provides secure Grid solutions
for businesses of all sizes. IBM and its partners offer 17 Grid solutions in
nine vertical industries.
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