The convergence of grid technology, virtualization, Web services and service-oriented architectures is a major issue for both business and science. "Finance Day" -- organized by Europlace and the Finance Innovation Competitivity Cluster, and Ecole Centrale Paris (ECP), with the support of the BEinGRID and EGEE projects -- was held Nov. 28 in Paris and put the spotlight on the key features and challenges of these new architectures for financial services.

Addressing an audience of 110 players from the sector, finance and grid experts explored these new technologies, highlighting how they can help lay the foundations for flexible service-oriented infrastructures and demonstrating why they are a strategic challenge, particularly for the finance industry, by bringing significant advantages and increasing the potential for innovation within the sector.

Talks by Edouard-François De Lencquesaing from Europlace and Christian Saguez from ECP set the stage for talks by key IT actors from the business and research community. Elies Prunés, ATOS Origin (Spain), introduced the morning session with a look at the convergence of grid, SOA, Web services and virtualization; Microsoft's Bernard Ourghanlian outlined the corporate grid computing strategy; Kris Buggenhout, CNE solution architect for HPC/grid at Sun Microsystems, offered a new perspective on performance and computing; Timothy Carley of DataSynapse evaluated enterprise virtualization and grid computing for finance; Joan Massó of GRIDSYSTEMS, a partner of BEinGRID, focused on the Fura service-oriented middleware with a talk on grids in full swing; and EC-funded project GRIDTRUST was represented by Alvaro Arenas, who assessed trust management in grids.

The afternoon session explored finance applications with talks by Alain Marbach of BNP-Paribas taking a look at the stakes of these new architectures; Jerome Cardon of ING highlighting business benefits and challenges of grid in financial markets; and Didier Asseline of Reuters offering an overview of Reuters Kondor + and the grid.

BEinGRID

Santi Ristol of ATOS Origin (Spain) highlighted the goals of the BEinGRID project and its range of business experiments with the grid. Italo Epicoco of SPACI discussed online grid services for financial institutions and the implementation of gLite in Portfolio management; and Olivier Blumberger of AXA focused on "Variable Annuities and the Option to Lapse."

EGEE-II

Gabriel Zaquine of CS SI (France), leading the EGEE Industry Task Force, illustrated how EGEE is attracting interest from numerous business sectors, outlining the support mechanisms designed both to facilitate "win-win" collaborative work with the project and to foster adoption of the gLite middleware with a set of case studies.

Two EGEE Business Associates, Excelian and Platform Computing, shared expertise, as well. The talk by Adam Vile of Excelian centered on "Data Caching: Dealing with Data -- Overcoming the Challenges of Large-Scale Data Distribution in Near Real Time Environments." Vile said, "Excelian are keen to support events like the Paris Industry Day which represent a coming together of industry and research in order to share experiences of grid and related technology. Exploring common challenges across both the finance and research communities will, I am sure, lead to mutual empathy, key discoveries on both sides and, hopefully, future collaborations that will be of mutual benefit."

Gilles Tourpe from Platform Computing outlined "Fabric-Based Computing -- Grid 2.0," with particular reference to integrating data, computation and successfully tackling any politics involved.

The Industry Day was sponsored by CETIC, NYSE Euronext, Platform Computing and Sun Microsystems. For more information on the event, visit www.beingrid.eu/742.html.

About EGEE

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project is co-funded by the European Commission and operates the world's largest multi-science infrastructure. The project aims to provide researchers in both academia and industry with access to major computing resources, independent of their geographic location. For more information, see www.eu-egee.org.

About BEinGRID

BEinGRID, Business Experiments in GRID, is the European Union's largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research, part of the EU's sixth research Framework Programme (FP6). The BEinGRID consortium is running 18 Business Experiments designed to implement and deploy grid solutions in industrial key sectors. For more information, see www.beingrid.eu/index.php?id=beingrid.

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Source: EGEE