IMF Builds A Grid
The global economic crisis has presented the International Monetary Fund with an interesting opportunity to help countries solve their economic troubles and restore its credibility (which over the last few years has been tainted by scandal and internal financial problems).
To make the most of this opportunity, the IMF is beefing up its economic modeling and risk analysis. To support this effort technologically, it's building a high-performance grid based on Platform Computing's Symphony software and servers containing IBM Cell processors and Intel chips.
The IMF's mission is to advance global growth and economic stability by monitoring the economic and financial policies of its 185 member countries and the world's financial institutions. It strives to identify possible risks to stability and growth. Several of the IMF's risk analysis and macroeconomic models rely heavily on Monte-Carlo simulations that were previously run on individual workstations and servers. The resulting latency and computation run-time often created efficiency and productivity bottlenecks; something that could not be sustained given the exponential increase in workloads. The grid the IMF is putting in place should facilitate the calculation of complex economic models more rapidly and efficiently. The IMF estimates that Platform Symphony will accelerate processing time for economic modeling computations tenfold, allowing economists to significantly increase their productivity.
"Demand has been growing since before the financial crisis," notes Jean Salvati, information technology officer at the IMF. "The models we're asked to implement and run have become more sophisticated and demanding, and we realized that buying better machines each year we won't achieve a huge leap in performance, only 10%-15% more. We wanted a breakthrough in performance."
The IMF builds its models using mathematic libraries such as Matlab and Visual Numerics. "It's never fast enough," Salvati notes. "The models that used to take days to run, we'd like to run in a couple of hours at most."
Under the high-performance grid the IMF is building, users continue to run their Excel-based applications while the Platform software redistributes workloads to the servers based on performance requirements.
Salvati's experience with the IBM Cell has been mixed. There's a steep learning curve, he says. "You have to invest some time to learn the ins and outs and limitations of the architecture," including rewriting code to parallelize it to run across multiple cpus, he says. "But when you've made this investment, the speed up is considerable. The peak performance of one Cell machine is about five times the peak performance of the top-of-the-line Intel processor."
The IMF is currently testing and benchmarking the system and expects to take it live by early next year. It plans to have about 20 computers included in the grid when its completed.
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