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Windows Compute Cluster Server Demoed at Stockbroker Conference
Published: June 21, 2006
by Alex Woodie
At a stockbroker conference yesterday, Microsoft unveiled a new securities modeling and trading application running on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the supercomputers version of Windows Server recently released by Microsoft. The new application uses Excel and Excel Services, the new feature lets Excel workloads run on a server.
It doesn't look like Microsoft is going to get into the trading application business. But it wanted to demonstrate how its new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 operating system could be put to use in securities trading, which is one of the industries it's targeting with the new product.
John Borazan, group product manager of the HPC edition of Windows, says the security trading industry is one area that can get an "enormous improvement in performance" by hosting Excel spreadsheets on HPC clusters. "The re-pricing or re-calculation of a portfolio could take less than 30 seconds by offloading that onto a cluster, whereas it can take two to five minutes today," he says.
The application used an Excel spreadsheet as the primary interface, and hooked into Excel Services running on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which provided the back-end analytic horsepower. The underlying hardware was a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 4000. The system was shown at the HP and Microsoft Break Room at the SIA Technology Management Conference & Exhibit, which is taking place this week in New York City.
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