Grid Standards and the Finance Industry

John BarrResearch Director Financial Markets

OGF22 Boston

Grid API for FSI

• Motivation• Participation• Outcome

Motivation

• Visited many investment banks

• All have the same requirement

• Define grid abstraction layer– To avoid vendor lock-in

• 10 banks, 10 different (but similar) abstraction layers

• Opportunity for common API definition

Initial Activity

• Kick-off meeting– 6 banks– major compute/data grid middleware vendors– interested parties (Intel, GCN, Excelian, 451)

• Compute grid a done deal

• Compute/data grid integration next hurdle

• Agreed to define use cases as first step

Follow-up

• 2nd Meeting– 6 banks (different participants)– major compute/data grid middleware vendors– interested parties (Intel, GCN, Excelian, 451)

• Use Cases discussed

• What next?– Pressed for commitment from banks– It all went very quiet

So what now?

• Without buy-in from banks no point

• Continuing interest – but no commitment

• Excelian doing consulting work in this area– So there is a real need…