The French financial analysis solutions provider, Murex, has chosen ClusterVision to supply cluster management software and professional support services for its new HPC cluster in Paris, which is used to develop risk and asset management solutions for financial organisations worldwide.
After the completion of a successful trial, Murex will use Bright Cluster Manager, supported by ClusterVision, as part of an overall HPC management service for their existing GPU powered compute cluster. The cluster is primarily used as an in-house development and testing platform for Murex’s commercial software.
Murex is one of Europe’s largest software developers, and one of the world’s leading providers of software and services to the financial sector. Its flagship product, Murex MX-3, is used for risk analysis in financial market trading, and has over 36,000 users at 200 institutions in 65 countries worldwide.
Risk analysis is both computationally and data intensive, and is one of the most rapidly growing application areas for high performance computing. Murex’s new HPC capability now allows them to manage complex financial products in high precision, and in near real time, compared to a previous capability of only computing analytics once or twice a day.
The system comprises a single head node, with redundant power supply and hard disk drives, and 16 IBM iDataplex dx360 M3 server compute nodes. Each server incorporates two of Intel’s X5675 six-core, 3.06GHz clock speed processors and two Nvidia Tesla M2090 accelerators. System interconnect is managed via Gigabit Ethernet and Mellanox QDR infiniband, and storage is provided by IBM’s high performance clustered file system, GPFS. Large volume data analytics applications, such as the financial analysis solutions developed by Murex, are particularly suited to acceleration, using GPUs.
As a relative newcomer to cluster computing, Murex needed cluster management that was easy to install and operate, and that would create a robust reference platform for their own software development process. After an evaluation of their requirements, ClusterVision supplied Murex with Bright Cluster Manager, initially as a four-node, six-month, proof-of-concept demonstration. Murex has now implemented full cluster management, using 17 Bright Cluster Manager licences, together with a three-year provision of associated professional services. ClusterVision will also assist the team at Murex in their evaluation of the latest release of Bright Cluster Manager, version 6.0, where the Amazon EC2 cloud bursting capabilities are of particular interest.
‘IT resources are rare these days and the Bright Computing cluster management suite enabled us to avoid investing a huge number of man days rediscovering what others have already done, or re-developing something internally that we would have had to support for years. The possibility to extend our cluster with EC2 is perfectly suited to our usage since, from time to time, we need to run some benchmarks on huge test cases which exceed our own compute capacity,’ said Pierre Spatz, head of quantitative analysis at Murex.
