This solution drastically lowers the barrier to adoption of High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Financial Services Industry. Platform Symphony 4 is focused on delivering the software capabilities to financial organizations to rapidly and easily achieve application performance. In addition, Platform Symphony 4 is launching an online community giving developers free access to the Symphony Developer Edition with no restrictions and no time limits.

The Financial Services Industry uses HPC infrastructure software to allow them to develop and run mission critical compute and data intense applications across a grid. Platform Symphony 4 offers a powerful solution to easily develop and deploy service-oriented HPC applications that can run five to ten times faster than other solutions currently available. This environment supports the demanding requirements of key business processes such as intraday risk calculations, pre-trade pricing and end-of-day value at risk calculations.

Platform Symphony 4 is highly scalable and can support many applications across the front, middle and back office. It enables the running of a single application on a small cluster, up to hundreds of applications sharing tens of thousands of multi-core nodes.

Platform Symphony 4 also facilitates a utility service model which is fundamental to the easy sharing of valuable IT compute resources within an organization. These sharing environments achieve the highest resource utilization possible and drastically reduce costs and energy requirements in the data center while ensuring service levels. Platform Symphony 4 reduces the complexity in managing a shared pool of resources, enabling enterprise-class resource sharing and availability.

"With Platform Symphony 4, Financial Services companies can build grid-ready applications quicker and at a lower cost. This is extremely important to the mission critical banking environment where the improved management of risk will result in competitive advantage," said Jingwen Wang, Vice President Products, Platform Computing. "Through our product and community activities, Platform is committed to making it as easy as possible for companies to build and deploy models for the grid."

Platform Symphony 4 will be available in January 2008.