Banks and Capital Market Firms Can Now Assess Portfolio Trading Risks at Great Speeds with High Performance Computing
Santa Clara, CA, March 26, 2009 – Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA), today announced new benchmark performance results for the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) using Intel(R)-based Sun Fire(TM) x4450 servers. In rigorous testing for scalability, the combined platform performed 1.8 million reads per second and 1.1 million writes per second, with sub-one-millisecond latency, and also topped 16,000 page generations per second with six-millisecond latency over a local area network.
“With the GigaSpaces XAP running on Sun’s Java HotSpot(TM) Virtual Machine (VM), application architects do not have to make a choice between distributed and vertically scaled architectures; that is, between scaling out and scaling up,” said Ambreesh Khanna, Global Head of Financial Services for Sun Microsystems. GigaSpaces XAP enables applications to take advantage of the scalability of multiprocessing while realising the benefits of a distributed architecture.”
Achieved in testing with the full Monte Carlo Value at Risk method of risk simulations for trading portfolios, these results demonstrate that significant performance enhancements are possible using High Performance Computing (HPC) as the infrastructure is scaled. Traders and analysts can now cost-effectively perform full-risk simulations on their portfolios in mere minutes, instead of hours, and run pre-trade scenarios in milliseconds.
“This benchmark underlines how we can collaborate to innovate and drive real performance and total cost of ownership benefits for our clients,” said Nigel Woodward, Global Director, Financial Services for Intel. “All banks are looking to understand their risks and exposures within a couple of hours, and real-time is the ultimate objective. These benchmarks demonstrate that customers can cost-effectively perform full risk simulations for their trading portfolios in minutes instead of hours, and pre-trade what-ifs in milli-seconds.”
The tests were conducted on Sun Fire x4450 servers using Intel(R) Xeon(R) 7460 processors with six cores per CPU running Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System and Sun’s Java HotSpot VM and using GigaSpaces XAP as the middleware software. This proved to be a scalable solution that provides both low latency and high throughput in HPC-based application environments. The tests confirmed the exceptional stability of the Solaris 10 OS and Java 6 Java Virtual Machine, even in the most demanding scenarios.
“The results are extraordinary,” according to Shay Hassidim, Deputy Chief Technology Officer of GigaSpaces. “We found that the time to complete the analysis dropped linearly as new computation nodes were added, and we found evidence that this would continue up to extremely high numbers of nodes.”
The mission-critical application benchmark measured the computational performance of a risk management system as processors and nodes were added to the grid. The load of performing the calculations was distributed across an increasing number of compute nodes, added dynamically without any modifications to the Gigaspaces application. The overall time to calculate the scenarios fell linearly as these additional nodes were added. In addition to this risk management benchmark, the tests also included a mix of high-throughput scenarios typical in real-time analytics and on-line financial services application. As the nodes were added, the time taken to recalculate the portfolio fell from 2560 seconds with one computation node to 70 seconds with 64 computation nodes.
For a detailed examination of the benchmark environment, the scenarios tested and the results, see here: http://blog.gigaspaces.com/2009/02/09/ultra-scalable-and-blazing-fast-the-sun-fire-x4450-intel-7460-gigaspaces-xap-platform-18-million-operationssec
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries an on the Web at http://sun.com
Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, Java, HotSpot, The Network is the computer, the Sun logo, Sun Fire and Solaris are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Intel(R) and Intel(R) Xeon(R) are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
About GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of application platforms for Java and .Net environments that offer an alternative to traditional application-servers. The company’s eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) allows businesses and developers to predictably scale systems under any peak demand, guarantee performance under any data processing load, and seamlessly leverage the economies-of-scale offered by virtual computing environments such as clouds and grids. XAP leverages open-source and standard development frameworks to speed new application development and simplify migration of existing systems from traditional middleware and application server technologies to new virtual computing architectures.
GigaSpaces customers include six of the world’s top 10 investment banks, world-leading exchanges, market data providers, hedge funds, retail banks, leading international and US telecommunications and mobile carriers, global Web-commerce companies, five of the world’s top online gaming companies, and leading Internet media organizations. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices in the US, Europe and Asia.