BNP Paribas has gone live with an on-demand computing service from IBM to run power-hungry pricing and modelling applications across its fixed income derivatives operation.
IBM is providing supercomputing power through its new London Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) centre to support BNP Paribas’ expanding derivatives operations. The service has gone live three months after the French bank and vendor inked a three-year deal for an initial capacity of 2500 IBM BladeCentre servers and scope for up to 2500 more.
Bruce Lee, head of fixed income capital markets production at BNP Paribas says the bank explored over 18 options for providing the capacity required to supports its expanding operations in the second half of 2006.
"IBM’s on-demand option emerged as the most competitive on price/performance, comparing favourably with buying hardware and hosting it ourselves," he says.
BNP Paribas also had the objective to build a calculation capability that could meet the derivatives needs from New York and Tokyo - processing their compute jobs on the central calculation farm in Europe.
Nick Gair, infrastructure solutions, IBM, says BNP Paribas is the second major bank to rent space at the London DCCOD centre, which opened only last month.
"DCCOD offers our clients the flexibility to leverage vast computing resources and expertise while helping to conserve valuable floor space and reduce energy requirements – especially in areas where their need for immense computing power is prone to dramatic growth or variability," he says.