A team of about 15 IT staff worked with IBM for a year to build the grid system that runs the retirement tool. It comprises 12 servers at the firm's Phoenix data center, which run on Intel chips, and the system uses open-source software tools in Globus Toolkit 2.0. The xSeries 330 servers run on Red Hat Linux and IBM's DB2 database.
"The grid lets you do lots and lots of what-if scenarios," he says. But it won't stop there. Dibble says that for an electronic brokerage like Schwab, there's a lot of excess computing power that sits around. "We have to build an infrastructure to accommodate the busiest of days - two times average peak volume. That's a lot of capacity sitting around."
While the initial Schwab rollout is "fairly contained," Dibble says, "the next phase is to spread the grid beyond the machines and into the network."
Grid computing grows hot
Daniel Powers, vice president of grid computing strategy at IBM Corporation, agrees that grid computing is ripe for financial-services firms. That's because financial services is an industry that has a tremendous number of applications to run in a high-performance computing environment. Moreover, he notes, online brokers deploy a large number of servers. "When you look at the utilization characteristics of servers, it's up and down. There's a tremendous amount of unused capacity. There's a really good opportunity to mix the computing environment to fit different parts of the business."
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