By Steve Ranger, 31 January 2006 11:20
French bank BNP Paribas is saving money by connecting idle desktop PCs into a giant grid to boost its computing capability.
The bank's equity and derivatives division, BNP Paribas Arbitrage, is deploying Platform Computing's Symphony package to make use of the processing power of PCs that sit idle at night.
BNP IT manager Denis Esnault told silicon.com: "It's an economical reason - we have a lot of PCs which are doing nothing during the night. We have this free resource which we can use.
"The price of the [grid software] licence is quite cheap compared to the cost of buying [more] computers. The price is something very important for us - if it's not cheaper there's no economic value to doing it with the PCs."
Using the PCs in a grid at night doesn't have an impact on them in the day, he said: "We don't send calculations in the day."
At the moment the bank is getting 6,000 computing hours out of 700 machines which would have otherwise stood idle, and hopes to extend the grid further to operations in Hong Kong, New York and Tokyo.
Platform said the PC grid could be extended out to 2,000 desktops, and the Symphony software will also be used with 500 servers to further boost BNP Paribas' processing capacity.
The grid will be used to help calculate Value At Risk (VAR) calculations for the Equities and Derivatives market.
Platform Computing said that on average, financial services organisations have 20,000 desktop PCs running at only 10 per cent capacity.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Simon
Not quite free. The computers will be using significantly more electricity while processing that while idle - and if not, then someone should be held to account for not enabling energy saving features !
It might be interesting to work out the long term cost of this vs running a single central machine which will probably use less power than those thousands of desktops.
Oh yes, and why the heck are all those machines left switched on overnight anyway ?
2. Allan
I guess power switches were an optional extra and as they are such a cost sensitive company they did not take that option.
3. M.vamshidhar Reddy
when there is more computing operations in banking system,
the risk of data losing is more.
we need to manage data more efficiently .
security for data is also an major issue.
banks should ensure, that they have a clear policy for securing data.
banks should ensure enough of testing is made for providing security to their clients.
Once an online banking application is live , it is more prone to security threat.
lastly banking should provide complete solution to a customer , like a single account links to all kinds of services , he never did expect in his life.(because good service brings more customer's).
These services which you(banks) provide to customers should be more in a competitive manner , so that the customer should think he is so lucky that is why he has account in your bank.