SGI AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY OPEN FIRST FINANCIAL INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS CENTER
SGI and Cornell University have announced the opening of the first Financial Industry Solutions Center (FISC), a joint venture dedicated to helping the financial community solve their most challenging computational problems in risk management, financial engineering and business intelligence. With the participation of world-class software developers and solutions providers, FISC is a resource and partner for financial corporations worldwide offering hands-on evaluation and testing of technologies, customized solutions and onsite consultation for software optimization.
"Uniting the resources and expertise of a leading computing manufacturer with the intellectual power of a top research university will result in new insights and innovative solutions that will save clients both time and money," said Thomas F. Coleman, who will be directing the SGI/Cornell FISC. Coleman, a computer scientist and director of Cornell's high-performance computing center, is applying his optimization expertise to a variety of financial problems, including dynamic hedging in a volatile market.
Working with Dr. Coleman is Robert A. Jarrow, professor of finance and economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management. Dr. Jarrow is a recognized leader in financial engineering and recipient of the IAFE Financial Engineer of the Year Award. SGI's senior vice president and chief financial officer, Steven J. Gomo, is the executive sponsor of FISC New York for SGI.
Located at 55 Broad Street in the heart of New York City's financial district, FISC provides the financial community with the latest parallel computing and visualization technology from SGI combined with leading financial modeling and computational finance expertise from Cornell. FISC provides global financial services, investment, mortgage, insurance, and banking firms with a secure and confidential environment to develop and test their own proprietary solutions and optimize software with the help of onsite hardware systems engineers and software engineers. In addition, FISC and member partners will work directly with clients to develop customized, state-of-the-art business intelligence solutions for financial applications.
"Collaborative efforts between academia and industry to tackle specific problems often result in superior solutions," said Deborah Williams, research director, Meridien Research. "The availability of resources for research and testing of new modeling approaches will certainly help to further the industry's understanding of risk management. As these models have become more complex and reliance on them has increased, the need for optimization and thorough testing has increased dramatically."
Throughout the year, FISC New York will host a series of financial seminars. For more information about FISC New York and the Financial Seminar Series, please visit the FISC web site at http://www.fisc-ny.com.
Partners contributing technology and expertise to FISC include:
Leading financial institutions worldwide depend on the exceptional performance, bandwidth, and scalability of SGI's ccNUMA (cache-coherent non-uniform memory access) architecture-based servers and visual workstations for compute-intensive financial applications that require fast analysis of large, complex data sets and for fast, reliable file serving. Through FISC, financial organizations have access to a powerful arrangement of advanced computing technologies including a 64-processor Origin 2000 server, a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 graphics supercomputer, Intel processor-based SGI 1400M and SGI 1400L servers, Silicon Graphics 320 visual workstations, and SGI's innovative visual data mining software, MineSet.
Cornell University is a world-renowned research university with top-ten programs in computer science and business. Cornell's research leadership combined with the Cornell Theory Center's (CTC) expertise in high performance computing and visualization create fertile ground for advances in computational science and financial engineering.
SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at http://www.sgi.com..