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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
TOPSPIN, PLATFORM TO GRID-ENABLE CAPITAL MKTS, RISK MGMT APPS
Topspin Communications and Platform Computing 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 percent 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 10 times 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 of 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 of
high performance computing at 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 of 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."
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