Monday, November 16, 2009

Convey Computer™ Corporation Unveils New Financial Analytics Personality

The latest personality for the Convey HC-1™, the Financial Analytics Personality, accelerates critical financial-trade, economic, and risk-management analysis. As Wall Street steps up its algorithmic arms race, Convey is poised to help institutions extract the most power and efficiency from their high-performance computing environments.

The real key to the Convey system is that you don’t need exotic language variations or non-standard programming extensions to access the hardware.

Portland, OR (PRWEB) November 16, 2009 -- Convey Computer™ Corporation, the pioneer of hybrid-core computing, today introduced its Financial Analytics Personality (FAP) for the Convey HC-1™ servers. The new personality will be demonstrated at SC09 in the Convey booth, #2589, and will be available in December.

According to industry sources, more than 73 percent of U.S. equity trading volume is the product of advanced algorithmic strategies. Convey’s Financial Analytics Personality will meet the analytical needs of quantitative analysts, data center IT professionals, and financial-services executives. As Wall Street steps up its algorithmic arms race, Convey is poised to help institutions extract the most power and efficiency from their high-performance computing environments.

“One of the major problems facing developers of financial applications is that the instruction set of commodity processors doesn’t map well to many financial algorithms,” states Tony Brewer, Convey co-founder and chief technology officer. “Even a simple intrinsic function can take hundreds of instructions and, in many of these applications, that intrinsic might be executed millions of times.”
The Convey solution hardwires these functions into the HC-1 system hardware, which can be many times more efficient than a sequence of commodity instructions. The ANSI-standard Convey compilers automatically recognize constructs in the application that can take advantage of hardware speed-ups, so the developer doesn’t need to know the intricacies of the hardware to reap these performance benefits.

“Functions like pseudo-random number generation (Mersenne Twister), quasi-random sequence generation (Sobol sequence), and cumulative normal distribution are all packaged into what we call a personality,” said Brewer. “The personality carries out these functions at the gate level, which opens up opportunities for parallelism and vastly increased performance. But the real key to the Convey system is that you don’t need exotic language variations or non-standard programming extensions to access the hardware.”

The Financial Analytics Personality is the latest in the company’s series of computing “personalities,” or application-specific instruction sets that help provide increases in performance for specific high-performance computing functions. The HC 1, which fits smoothly into existing data centers as a node in a cluster and is based on x86 architecture, also uses industry-standard networking and runs industry-standard Linux.

Convey’s innovative hybrid-core computer system marries the low cost and simple programming model of a commodity system with the performance of a customized hardware architecture. Applying application-specific hardware to compute intensive algorithms lets industries like financial analytics break the power/performance wall that exists with today’s commodity processors. Plus, hybrid-core computing helps these industries “go green” because it provides vastly more performance per watt, substantially reducing datacenter power and cooling requirements.

About Convey Computer Corporation

Based in Richardson, Texas, Convey Computer breaks power, performance and programmability barriers with the world’s first hybrid-core computer—a system that marries the low cost and simple programming model of a commodity system with the performance of a customized hardware architecture. Convey brings decades of experience and intellectual assets to performance problem-solving. Its executive and design teams all come from successful backgrounds of building computer companies, most notably Convex Computer Corporation and Hewlett-Packard. Convey Computer investors include Braemar Energy Ventures, CenterPoint Ventures, Intel Capital, InterWest Partners, Rho Ventures, and Xilinx. More information can be found at: www.conveycomputer.com.


Convey Computer, the Convey logo, and Convey HC-1 are trademarks of Convey Computer Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

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