Gaselys Rolls Out Platform

NEW YORK—Officials from energy trading firm Gaselys, a joint venture between Gaz de France and Société Générale (SocGen), announced today that it has deployed financial software services for grid computing solution Symphony from Platform Computing.

The solution is intended to simplify the management and implementation of grid technology. It allows businesses to either share or keep private their computing resources, says a Platform spokesperson. Groups within a business have the option of borrowing server cycles but the owners of the servers have the right of first refusal. Borrowers can also distribute demand across several clusters, allowing a smaller footprint in any one place, adds the spokesperson.

Earlier this month, the vendor released its latest version, 3.1, of Symphony that includes increased sharing capacities.

"Customers were looking for a software product that could share the hardware with the grid, but still make it available when necessary," says Martin Harris, a product manager with Platform.

The vendor has been working with SocGen since 2003 when the firm selected Platform to provide its grid computing needs. It later expanded that use to grid-enable CPUs for processing equity, interest-rate and credit derivatives calculations, in addition to the commodities transactions (DWT, Nov. 28, 2005).

Initially, the implementation at Gaselys was a "duplication of what has been done at SocGen," says Emmanuel Lecerf, a technical manager of financial services with Platform. But the proceedings have since taken on their "own life" and Gaselys expects to be fully migrated to Symphony 3.1 by year's end, he says.

Gaselys, which was formed in 2001, has been dabbling in grid computing since 2003, when it implemented a 24-hour server farm. The firm will upgrade to the latest versions of Symphony as they become available, Platform officials say.

With Symphony "calculations that were previously too compute-intensive to run more than once per day on one dedicated server were available in real-time," says Philippe Vedrenne, a managing director with Gaselys.

Gaselys officials were not available for further comment.

Platform's grid offering can be found in a number of other Wall Street firms. Citi is currently using Symphony 3.0 for its grid network (DWT, Oct. 30, 2006). The bank's first grid was built in 2005 with 1,000 CPUs for one application and one business line using Symphony 3.0. Citi is moving to double the number of grid-enabled CPUs to support multiple applications and business lines. The grid program, scheduled to last four years, will end in 2007 with about 10,000 connected CPUs (DWT, Dec. 18, 2006).

Also last year, Lehman Brothers started the migration of its market data services to a global grid computing platform, in this case Symphony (DWT, Sept. 25, 2006). HSBC also has grids running on Platform offerings (DWT, Jan. 16, 2006).