GOVERNMENT

IBM BladeCenter powered by Cell Broadband Engine and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform provides breakthrough algorithmic performance: IBM and Red Hat today announced a new algorithmic trading platform to help financial services firms take advantage of accelerated streaming data, real-time analytics and complex multi-path calculations in real-time trading and risk environments. The new platform is based on the IBM BladeCenter QS21 powered by Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) technology running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. The IBM BladeCenter QS21 delivers twice the memory density and I/O throughput as the previous version, enabling financial markets firms to achieve orders of magnitude performance increases in Monte Carlo simulations, streaming analytics and complex multi-path calculations. IBM and Red Hat will demonstrate the new platform at the 2007 High Performance on Wall Street event in New York City on September 17, which includes an option pricing demo running over 10x faster than on previous generation systems and a data streaming demonstration showing FIX message parsing rates of over nine million per second with less than 50 microseconds of latency. "Financial markets firms are looking for new ways to increase the speed and better manage complex algorithmic trades to stay ahead of the competition and drive more value for their clients," said Thomas Swett, vice president, global financial services sector, IBM. "We have achieved an order of magnitude boost in trading speed and throughput with Cell/B.E. technology on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. As a result, our joint clients can now easily integrate the new platform into their existing IT infrastructure as their primary high-velocity trading engine and data analytics backbone." Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, announced in March 2007, is the world's leading, commercially supported, high-performance, open source operating system. The product has achieved impressive performance and price/performance results. Ongoing feature development is expected to deliver additional performance improvements. The IBM BladeCenter QS21 with Cell/B.E. technology is a flexible, high-throughput, low-latency, front-office server platform for financial markets that enables high-speed calculations and streaming data integration to machine-based trading systems. The new blade server is the latest IBM technology designed for the financial services industry complementing IBM WebSphere Front Office software, IBM DB2 data server software and new enterprise stream computing technology from IBM Research. "Performance and throughput must be evaluated at every level of the trading platform," said Joanne Rohde, executive vice president of Operations and Financial Service at Red Hat. "There can be no bottlenecks from front to back. This integrated hardware, software and data broker solution is designed to maximize speed, with the advantages of cell processing technology, the high-speed reliable operating system and transaction processing handling and through virtualized storage." For more information or for a demonstration of this new solution, please visit the IBM booth #208 or the Red Hat booth #207 at the 2007 High Performance on Wall Street event in New York City, September 17, 2007. For additional information on IBM and Red Hat's partnership, please visit its Web site.