Investment bank races apps around the grid

Banking giant Merrill Lynch is using grid technologies to boost the performance of its applications, with some now running four times faster than before.

Juan Lando, director of the company's grid centre of expertise, said grid is a technology with "tremendous amounts of benefit" for the business.

Grid allows companies to get more use out of their existing hardware.

For example, a business might hit four or five peaks in demand for computing power in a day, and so would buy enough processing power - hardware - to make sure it could cope with those peaks. But that could mean a lot of spare capacity sits unused most of the time. Grid allows organisations to share that computing power - both in servers and desktops - and so reduce that waste.

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Lando told the Finexpo conference London: "The real definition of grid is not about a new distributed computing platform. For me grid comes down to automated resource sharing across multiple applications.

"The real story is being able to share compute power where and when it's needed on demand. If you can utilise hardware across the data centre you will find you have an abundance of hardware you can use for grid computing."

Lando said the financial services giant now has applications running three or four times faster - and in one case 20,000 times faster - when running on the grid.

He said: "Today we have many business groups across the globe that share these resources that are located across multiple data centres."

He said processor-intensive or data-intensive applications are the best suited to grid, which uses a 'follow the moon' strategy of picking up spare capacity as servers and PCs become idle at the end of the working day.