Distributed Computing Nazcatech offers a complete Distributed Computing environment, comprising a combination of free open source packages and additional proprietary components provided by Nazcatech.

Design

The Nazcatech Distributed Computing environment consists of a cluster of dedicated Linux servers servicing requests from client workstations.

• Requests are generated from client workstations
• The client application may be a bespoke application or a spreadsheet addin such as Nazcatech Sensitivity Analysis
• Each request comprises a list of one or more calculations, such as the iterations in a sensitivity analysis, or the pricing of a portfolio
• A DLL on the client workstation wraps the request into a SOAP message which is transmitted to the Grid via HTTP under SSL encryption
• The grid receives the request, separates each calculation in the list into a separate job, and queues these jobs for processing on available nodes
• The analytics library necessary to execute each calculation is resident on each node of the grid
• The results of the calculations are collected and transmitted back to the client for display in the local spreadsheet or application

Optimization

The Nazcatech Distributed Computing environment is optimized for

• Multiple calculations performed in parallel, such as sensitivity analyses and portfolio pricing
• Resource intensive calculations such as Monte Carlo analyses

Performance

Distributed Computing offers dramatic performance increases over local calculations. The magnitude of the improvement depends upon the number and specification of the nodes in the grid, and to a lesser extent on the bandwidth of the link between client and grid. In one typical example an analysis which ran locally in four hours completed on the grid in ten minutes.

Hosting

Nazcatech's Distributed Computing environment offers the customer complete flexibility with regard to hosting of hardware:

• Customers may purchase processing time on a communal datacenter hosted by Nazcatech
• Nazcatech can host a cluster dedicated for the use of a single customer
• Nazcatech can assist a customer in implementing the Distributed Computing architecture (including source code) on hardware maintained in-house at the client site