Julian Cook, FNX’s FX Options Product Manager said, “Until quite recently parallel processing was synonymous with supercomputers and was mainly used for complex scientific simulations, such as weather prediction. FNX is the first vendor to offer a parallel processing architecture for FX-Options. The impetus for this project came from the prediction by customers that future growth would result in the need to run scenario analysis on books of several hundred thousand exotic options at any one time, without waiting several hours for the results.”

Mr Cook adds, “When implementing a parallel architecture you have to pay careful attention to load-balancing and inter-cpu communication. In benchmark testing, the solution we implemented produced a better than 4x speedup across 4 CPU's. The best part, in my view, is that the system runs straight out of the box. It automatically scales to higher numbers of CPU's, but does not require any special setup by the customer at all.”

Paul Gibson, FNX’s VP Business Development adds “An explosion in client volumes and the globalisation of institutions has posed new challenges in processing and risk managing positions in real-time. Institutions are finding that their business expansion is hampered by incumbent systems being neither scalable nor expandable across multiple legal entities. FNX’s Sierra System offers an exceptional solution to this problem, the introduction of parallel processing being another example of our total commitment to our clients in meeting their evolving needs”