Microsoft to Describe Real-Time Modeling for Trading

Microsoft plans to discuss its four-month-old effort to apply "pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling" to the massive computing needs of Wall Street Monday.

Bill Hilf of Microsoft will describe the company's Technical Computing Initiative at the High Performance Computing Financial Markets conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York at 8:30 a.m. Hilf is general manager of the project which incorporates:

• Technical computing to the cloud: On-premises systems are augmented with cloud resources to enable ‘just-in-time’ processing.
• Simple parallel development: New tools automate and simplify writing software that enables parallel processing of problems on the desktop, in clusters of servers and in the cloud.

• Increasingly powerful computing tools and applications: The project's development efforts are designed to produce new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration.

Hilf will be interviewed on stage by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, editor-of-chief Securities Technology Monitor. Also speaking on how to get more speed out of existing networks for securities transactions will be Blade Network Technologies' CEO Vikram Mehta. He will join executives from IBM and NYSE Technologies to discuss "New Approaches to Ultra-Low Latency and Creating Dynamic Insights" later on.

"Financial services data centers require an ever-growing amount of network bandwidth with the lowest possible latency and a maximum of two hops in their network topologies," said Mehta.

Blade this week introduced a "top-of-rack" 10 Gigabit Ethernet edge switch that can connect with trading networks at up to 40 Gigabits per second, called RackSwitch G8052. The switch "is designed for the demands of the data center to connect vast deployments of servers equipped with Gigabit Ethernet to 10G networks,'' said Blade Vice President Dan Tuchler.