Symphony for the Cell/B.E. technology offers a reliable and scalable HPC infrastructure for performing lightening-fast, pre- and post-trade analytics, enabling the faster domination of liquidity. With Symphony for the Cell/B.E. - based IBM BladeCenter, traders can run portfolio simulations much faster - reducing time to results by up to 80 percent. In addition, this tightly integrated solution facilitates rapid and easy deployment of sophisticated analytical applications to mission-critical trading environments.

"This announcement is ground-breaking because these two innovative and powerful technologies have been combined into a solution that has immediate applicability in the banking and financial markets", stated Jingwen Wang, Vice President, Products, Platform Computing. "By leveraging Symphony, banking applications can get up-and-running on a Cell/B.E.-based IBM BladeCenter with minimal effort. Symphony's policy engine rapidly enables the implementation enabling organisations to consider Cell/B.E. technology to accelerate a broader array of business requirements."

Platform Symphony for BladeCenter takes full advantage of the Cell/B.E. multi-core architecture. This allows Platform Symphony to optimize application performance by enabling near 100 percent utilization of all 18 cores on a Blade containing two Cell/B.E. processors. The joint solution is extremely energy efficient, effectively reducing hardware requirements while increasing resource utilization and throughput. Platform Symphony also allows the infrastructure to be shared by multiple applications, further reducing infrastructure costs while delivering energy costs savings.

"Since the IBM BladeCenter with the Cell/B.E. technology and Platform Symphony have both been tailored to accelerate critical functions in the trade cycle, it was a natural to pair these technologies together to create a high performance, low latency offering that provides customers with significant business benefits", stated Kevin Pleiter, Director, Global Financial Services Sector, IBM. "Combining this offering with the IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) for Multicore Acceleration, which includes Double Precision Financial Math Library's financial services organisations, can meet challenging business needs, while simultaneously reducing their data centre footprint and energy utilization."

Platform Symphony for IBM BladeCenter with Cell/B.E. will be available in the second quarter of 2008, while Platform Symphony 4 is now generally available.