Introduction

For banks to gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly data-centric marketplace, portfolio managers and risk managers alike must access near real-time financial information. This is forcefully driving the demand for increasingly sophisticated computing capabilities, use of which is rapidly proliferating at several banks.

Key Findings

• Current Trends – Grid computing emerged as the most used HPC solution, followed by HPC Cloud Computing, Commodity HPC Cluster and GPU.

• Area of Use – Almost half of the responding banks use HPC exclusively in specific departments (43%) while a third use HPC across the entire organisation (32%).

• In-house vs. Vendor Solutions – There was a mixed response from participating firms in regard to the use of vendor packages. 41% of respondents use a combination of both in-house and vendor packages.

• Current Strategy – 42% of respondents stated that their current HPC strategy has been implemented for more than 36 months. The same respondents are using grid computing, either as a sole solution or in tandem with another HPC solution.

• Current Benefits – With an ever increasing amount of financial data to process and monitor, increased scalability and adaptability to volumes are the two most commonly expressed benefits of implementing an HPC solution.

• Challenges – Both tier-1 and tier-2 banks selected cost as the most concerning issue.

• Budget – Since the onset of the crisis, budgets have become highly constrained and tightly monitored. In the last 12 months, however, budgets have largely remained the same (30%) or have slightly increased (35%).

Conclusion

HPC is already proving to be an effective strategy at many banks. As the demand for more timely and accurate data processing increases, so will the need for more computational power. Therefore, even though the cost of HPC can be exceptionally high, an increasing number of banks should find this technology to be viable in the future.

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