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AMD and Rogue Wave Software have teamed up to boost parallel computing in the financial services industry.
The companies announced their plans to collaborate at the SIFMA (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) Technology Management Conference & Exhibit, which runs June 10 to 12 in New York.
Rogue Wave, which makes C++ components and infrastructure software for enterprise developers, said it will work with Advanced Micro Devices to enhance the processing power of specialized applications in the financial services industry. Using the Rogue Wave Hydra product suite, the companies plan to provide new solutions to help AMD customers further expand their parallel computing strategies.
The Rogue Wave Hydra Suite delivers a scalable service grid for high-performance business applications delivered with SOA (service-oriented architecture). The standards-based suite also supports the SCA (Service Component Architecture) and SDO (Service Data Objects) standards as well as C++ Web Services based on the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) standards.
The financial services industry requires HPC (high-performance computing) to process a high volume of transactions and churn through complex risk management algorithms. One way to enhance application performance is by taking advantage of multicore technology with applications that support parallel programming.
“The future of parallel computing depends on two key elements,” said Tom Gaunt, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Rogue Wave. “First, can your new and existing applications tap performance improvements without rewriting the code? Second, can they do it across multicore CPUs, GPUs [Graphical Processing Units] and other future specialized hardware? If enterprises cannot do both, parallel computing efforts won’t deliver on their promise. This collaboration is an important step in not just researching, but delivering solutions that address these challenges and further the cause of parallel computing.”
Gaunt said in addition to the promise of multicore CPU hardware, recent advances in GPU chip sets have allowed developers to harness the computing power of specialized modern graphics processors to deliver performance increases in HPC environments such as financial algorithmic applications. Yet, writing code in this area can be difficult and time-consuming, and using proprietary APIs means code written for one brand of GPU cannot be easily ported to another GPU or to multicore CPUs, Gaunt said.
Enter AMD. “AMD recognizes that offering users ways to develop applications that migrate easily between multicore CPUs, GPUs and future architectures is essential in enabling the productivity of our customers and the longevity of their applications,” said Patricia Harrell, director of AMD Stream Computing. “We are pleased that our relationship with Rogue Wave will enable us to work towards providing an important cross-platform programming solution, while at the same time growing our valuable technology partner ecosystem.”
Rogue Wave’s collaboration with AMD follows the company’s efforts with AMD competitor Intel, where Rogue Wave has been able to show a significant increase in throughput using Rogue Wave Hydra software with Intel’s quad-core processors. In tests with Intel, Hydra enabled single-threaded applications to take advantage of the increase in processing power without recoding for multithreading. For instance, a server with eight CPU cores was able to generate five times as much throughput as the single-core server and reached its maximum throughput when running six instances of the application service. A server with 16 CPU cores was able to generate nine times as much throughput as the single-core server and 183 percent greater throughput than the server with eight CPU cores.
AMD and Rogue Wave said the companies would have more to show regarding their collaboration “in the near future.”
Meanwhile, on June 9, Rogue Wave announced the appointment of Brian Pierce as its CEO. Pierce has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise application software and tools, Rogue Wave officials said.
Most recently, Pierce served as a senior vice president at Infor Global Solutions where he had responsibility for five independently operating business units, including TriSyn Group, which merged with Infor in 2006. Prior to the merger, Pierce served as president and chief operating officer of TriSyn Group. Previously, he was senior vice president of customer support and satisfaction at Tibco Software and served in senior field operations and services roles at InConcert (acquired by Tibco) and Xerox.