The Future of Grid Computing in a Cloud-Enabled World

Capital markets firms depend on technology to meet myriad business goals. Assessing risk, finding alpha, matching buyers and sellers, and making sense of large quantities of information all require extremely complex computations. Since the early 2000s, grid computing has been considered the best way to leverage and maximize the industry’s capital investment in the computing components that perform these tasks. With the technology and regulatory landscape changing dramatically, firms are looking to exploit new opportunities and control costs while meeting ever-increasing risk management and regulatory demands. Today’s financial firms have many options for compute, including hybrid cloud, on-site commodity server approaches, and alternative on-premises solutions such as hardware acceleration and supercomputers.

This TABB Group report considers the compute grid’s place in a cloud-enabled world, addresses options for optimizing onsite system performance, and discusses total cost of ownership (TCO) considerations for onsite grid components.

Getting the right mix of on- and off-premises solutions will be key in meeting today’s business challenges and innovating for tomorrow. Based on our research and outreach with users and managers of compute grids at buy- and sell-side financial institutions, TABB believes for the most computationally intensive workloads, capital markets firms will continue to rely on an in-house managed grid, or a grid-like solution, while other less-demanding workloads will be migrated to hybrid or public cloud solutions. Our outreach found that the majority of institutions plan to maintain or reinvest in their computational grids for the short-to-medium term; we also found a few early cloud and/or specialized hardware adopters.