The 29th Top 500 List was released recently. This list of world’s fastest supercomputers was dominated by US research lab with IBM’s bluegene at LLNL taking the top spot for the forth time in a row.
The fastest supercomputer in Europe is the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (ranked 9) in Spain. This supercomputing center is home to the GRID superscalar project (GRIDs), which allows grid-unaware applications to be parallelised at runtime and at task level. This project has now been Open sourced, more information can be found on the GRID superscalar web site.
The majority of supercomputers on the list cater to scientific computing. However, an interesting observation is the London IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCoD) supercomputer (ranked 100), which is currently being offered on a pay-as-you-go basis to financial companies.
“The offering is targeted primarily at financial markets customers, who require additional, high-performance computing power to run intraday and post-trading analytics, for example. The IBM/Intel platform offers a fast, highly secure addition to companies’ computing infrastructure which can be used on a flexible basis. The solution can be purchased in increments as small as eight hours a day, five days a week.”
In my opinion, pay-as-you-go computing for financial services will be a hard-sell due to the numerous restrictions and regulations (e.g. SOX) that govern the finance and banking industry in terms of data protection and risk management.