Platform Symphony Unleashes the Power of Cell Broadband Engine Technology

TORONTO , Canada, February 25, 2008 – Platform Computing today announced Symphony for the IBM BladeCenter® with Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) technology, a High Performance Computing (HPC) solution for financial services that delivers scalability and enhances performance of Platform Symphony. Platform Symphony is the only service-oriented software solution that supports the deployment of compute-intensive risk and analytical applications to this fast and powerful IBM server.


Symphony for the Cell/B.E. technology offers a reliable and scalable HPC infrastructure for performing lightening-fast, pre- and post-trade analytics, enabling the faster domination of liquidity. With Symphony for the Cell/B.E.-based IBM BladeCenter, traders can run portfolio simulations much faster – reducing time to results by up to 80 percent. In addition, this tightly integrated solution facilitates rapid and easy deployment of sophisticated analytical applications to mission-critical trading environments.


“This announcement is ground-breaking because these two innovative and powerful technologies have been combined into a solution that has immediate applicability in the banking and financial markets,” said Jingwen Wang, Vice President, Products, Platform Computing. “By leveraging Symphony, banking applications can get up-and-running on a Cell/B.E.-based IBM BladeCenter with minimal effort. Symphony’s policy engine rapidly enables the implementation enabling organizations to consider Cell/B.E. technology to accelerate a broader array of business requirements.”


Platform Symphony for BladeCenter takes full advantage of the Cell/B.E. multi-core architecture. This allows Platform Symphony to optimize application performance by enabling near 100 percent utilization of all 18 cores on a Blade containing two Cell/B.E. processors.  The joint solution is extremely energy efficient, effectively reducing hardware requirements while increasing resource utilization and throughput. Platform Symphony also allows the infrastructure to be shared by multiple applications, further reducing infrastructure costs while delivering energy costs savings.
 

“Since the IBM BladeCenter with the Cell/B.E. technology and Platform Symphony have both been tailored to accelerate critical functions in the trade cycle, it was a natural to pair these technologies together to create a high performance, low latency offering that provides customers with significant business benefits,” said Kevin Pleiter, Director, Global Financial Services Sector, IBM. “Combining this offeringwith the IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) for Multicore Acceleration, which includes Double Precision Financial Math Library’s financial services organizations, can meet challenging business needs, while simultaneously reducing their datacenter footprint and energy utilization.”


Platform Symphony for IBM BladeCenter with Cell/B.E. will be available in the second quarter of 2008, while Platform Symphony 4 is now generally available.


Register for the developer community today at my.platform.com/symphonyde and download the free Symphony Developer Edition.
 

About Platform Computing
Platform Computing is a pioneer and the global leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure software. The company delivers integrated software solutions that enable organizations to improve time-to-results and reduce computing costs. Many of the world’s largest companies rely on Platform for workload management and cluster and grid management. Platform has over 2,000 global customers and strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat and SAS, along with the industry’s broadest support for HPC applications. Building on 15 years of market leadership, Platform continues to define the HPC market. Visit www.platform.com.

 

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