The relative youth of standards hasn't stopped firms from pressing ahead. For its part, CSFB uses grid-management software from DataSynapse to mediate between requests by specific applications and the pool of available processor capacity. Part of that job is figuring out which requests should get priority. "It could be based on the relative time-sensitivity of each department, or even on how profitable a given trader is," says Frank Cicio, chief marketing and strategy officer, DataSynapse.
So the most profitable traders are rewarded with quicker response times. But grid isn't just about speed. Even if CSFB didn't enjoy a substantial speed boost from grid (which it does), Cushmaro would still embrace the technology. That's because it's easier to guarantee the availability of a centrally managed grid than it is to provide the same quality of service for mission-critical applications in separate areas, he says. "Complex environments tend to break and they're very difficult to fix," explains Cushmaro. "If you look at the reasons for outages on the Street today and the time duration of coming back from an outage, it is usually somehow related to the complexity of the environment."
Grids reduce complexity by de-emphasizing the importance of any given processor. A malfunctioning node in a grid doesn't bring a process grinding to a halt. In fact, even individual transactions can make it through an outage unharmed. "When a transaction is sent out to be executed, if the network or the power fails, we automatically move that over to an available processor, right where it left off," says DataSynapse's Cicio.
For some firms using commodity computing resources, it's hardly worth it to troubleshoot a hardware problem. "With one of our clients, when there's a problem with a particular node in the grid, they don't even bother repairing the node," says Bob Boettcher, vice president of financial services for Platform Computing, a Toronto-based grid software company. "They just rip out the board and insert another" - a far cry from caretaking Wall Street's legacy systems.
But massive legacy systems aren't the only area on Wall Street that can benefit from grid computing. Platform Computing introduced an adapter that supports data-crunching on a smaller scale. "Microsoft Excel is ubiquitous on the trading floors of banks," says Platform Computing's Boettcher. "We can allow people to just highlight a range of cells within a spreadsheet, and those calculations can be run anywhere on the grid."
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