Windows in Financial Services

The demands placed on actuarial software have never been higher, thanks to a combination of the evolving regulatory environment and advances in modeling techniques. What is more, the pressure being put on organizations’ IT resources to cope with these changes will only become more intense. The solution though lies in leveraging an enterprise-level high-performance computing [...]

Windows in Financial Services spoke with Rich Feldmann, managing director of U.S. Financial Services, to hear the latest developments coming from Microsoft’s U.S. Financial Services Group.
WFS: As we reported earlier this year, Microsoft’s U.S. Financial Services Group has been undergoing a major restructuring. Walk us through some of the latest progress that [...]

Every time somebody signs into their Facebook account, they access a server farm of more than 10,000 computers linked together in a High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment. At Google, a grid of 450,000 machines processes each search.
These virtual supercomputers, with their massive and economical computing power, are being adopted by financial institutions – including BMO Capital [...]

The Global Research Settlement along with a variety of rules and regulations has reshaped the function and structure of research over the past five years, with business models continuing to evolve at a staggering pace. The fifth anniversary of that historic agreement is approaching; questions about the future of research regulation are more pressing than [...]

The challenges facing Wall Street are causing a dramatic increase in the need for processing power but companies are already near their limit in terms of energy consumption and space, not to mention funding. They need higher performance but within the same power envelope. To find out what Intel has in store for the HPC [...]

Grinham Managed Funds (GMF) is processing high-frequency data faster while reducing its overhead for managing its infrastructure through the use of a new high-performance computing cluster based on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.
The Sydney, Australia-based hedge fund manager began by installing a small proof-of-concept cluster running the Windows XP operating system.
“We wanted a high-performance [...]

With so many investors eyeing the equity options market these days, Morningstar, Inc., a major provider of investment research, is now enthusiastically embracing a Windows-driven equity options data feed.
“Equity options are increasingly popular with the people we serve,” says Philip Guziec, derivatives specialist at Chicago, IL-based Morningstar. “We have 120 researchers here who analyze [...]

The insurance industry is under increasing short-term pressure. It faces growing competition from non-traditional competitors and must satisfy an investing public, increasingly aware of the ever-expanding number of investment options. In step with these pressures, the industry has evolved to develop products that are more complex and offer more aggressive returns.
This shift is putting new [...]

Enough is never enough. At least not for Wall Street. That applies to almost any element of the business – profits, market share, customers – you name it. There is also an insatiable appetite for computational power and that’s where high-performance computing (HPC) comes in. Financial Insights’ parent company, IDC, uses the term high-performance computing [...]

High-performance computing deals with very high volume and throughput-information processing. Financial IT consultant Ray Ferrara at Fiducité examines HPC from a Windows-based perspective.
Once the domain of expensive, esoteric research projects, high-performance computing (HPC) today is becoming mainstream, paralleling industries like automobiles where techniques proven for the race track find their way to the family [...]