The Treasury Services wing of Abbey National is using grid
computing, which allows multiple computers and spare processing
power on a distributed network to be applied to a common goal, for
complex risk assessments.
John Hasson, IT director of Abbey National Treasury Services
(Ants), said the model is ideal for power-hungry and repetitive
computations such as Monte Carlo calculations, where the same
calculation is done many times using different co-ordinates.
"Calculating risk is a perfect application for grid or peer-to-peer
computing," said Hasson. "It is massively attractive. You are
sweating your assets and it effectively gives you back a lot of
your processing power. It is a great step forward."
IT experts have mooted grid computing as the next generation of
business technology. But until recently business applications in
this field have been rare.
Philip Carnelley, software research director at Ovum, said that for
the type of work that Ants does the move makes good sense. "It can
be cost-effective if you get the right middleware," he added. But
he also warned of the danger of getting overexcited about the idea
of grid computing and stressed that the model is not for everyone.
"It is a big leap from here to the data-intensive applications like
HR we talk of in commercial computing and it is still a long way
from the whole computing as a utility idea," he said.
At present, Ants is only using about 5% of the processing power
available on its 1,300 PCs. Initially the company hopes to increase
this to 15%. The cost of increasing capacity in other ways, such as
buying more high-end PCs, would be "horrific", said Hasson.
Ants has been using the Livecluster grid-enabling technology from
DataSynapse on 100 PCs for the past six weeks. It has begun to
implement agents on the PCs to tell the servers when the PCs are
idle and available to provide processing power.
When Ants is satisfied that the agents do not interfere with other
applications on the desktop it will roll them out to include most
of the 1,300 PCs in the network, although there are no immediate
plans to extend the grid outside the building because of security
concerns.