Powers Unfiltered

Who says there’s no good news for financial companies?

Penny Crosman provided some good news for banks, hedge funds, and other money managers in her article today in Wall Street & Technology — good news for financial developers and IT professionals who need to access more processing power without complex application re-engineering. 

You can read the article for yourself — there are good quotes from AVM CTO Paul Algreen, a longtime Digipede customer — but from my perspective, the gist is this:

• CPUs are getting faster these days almost exclusively through putting more cores on a chip. 
• Hence, when you buy a fancy new server, performance only improves for applications that take advantage of multi-core architectures. 
• Yet most applications are single-threaded, leaving all but one core doing, umm, nothing. 
• AVM noticed this problem more than two years ago, and started using the Digipede Network to address it. 
• They’ve adapted compute-intensive legacy applications to run on a grid of multi-core boxes without expensive re-engineering, seeing huge performance gains. 
• Thanks to the intuitive programming model offered by the Digipede Framework SDK, AVM has added more and more applications to the grid since then, and they haven’t looked back.

This is quite typical of the experience many Digipede customers have had — that for most applications in financial services, multi-core and grid computing can be handled most effectively as two cases of the same general distributed computing problem.  

And yes, I’m going to plug our now-famous four-minute video on this topic again — you can watch it here.  Then you can request a free evaluation copy of the Digipede Network, and try it out on your own compute-intensive applications.  Because Intel and AMD aren’t waiting for the world to re-tool a few million enterprise developers; they’re banging out chips with more and more cores with every new generation. 

But with the right tools, you can take advantage of all that power — and that’s a welcome dose of good news for Wall Street!