The IMF works to advance global growth and economic stability by monitoring the economic and financial policies of its 185 member countries and the world's financial institutions. The current strain under which global financial markets are operating has required the IMF to undertake an unprecedented effort in economic modeling and risk analysis. The organization turned to Platform Computing to leverage its existing infrastructure and dramatically increase the performance and efficiency of complex financial applications in the most cost effective manner available.

The IMF strives to identify possible risks to stability and growth, in addition to providing advice on needed policy adjustments. Several of the IMF's risk analysis and macroeconomic models rely heavily on Monte-Carlo simulations that were previously run on individual workstations and servers. The resulting latency and computation run-time often created efficiency and productivity bottlenecks; something that could not be sustained given the exponential increase in workloads. The IMF choose Platform's flagship financial services product, Platform Symphony, to facilitate the calculation of complex economic models more rapidly and more efficiently. The IMF estimates that Platform Symphony will accelerate processing time for economic modeling computations tenfold, allowing economists to significantly increase their productivity.

"The IMF required a proven grid computing solution that would better utilize our existing compute resources to reduce the time required to run increasingly complex calculations," explained Jean Salvati, Information Technology Officer, IMF. "Platform Symphony will integrate into our existing infrastructure and enable significant response time improvement for our economists. In addition, Platform Symphony will be instrumental as we develop new modeling and simulation tools to assist our members and support our growing role in monitoring global financial institutions."

Similar to most major financial institutions, the IMF operates on a heterogeneous infrastructure with various hardware technologies, operating systems and underlying development platforms. The Platform Symphony deployment makes use of all these existing hardware assets, better utilizing idle CPUs within its global network of computers and expanding the agility and responsiveness of data-intensive applications. Platform Symphony operates by disseminating a complex economic computation across multiple smaller, underutilized computers within the IMF network, thereby enabling the overall calculation runtime to complete exponentially faster and with a higher level of predictability.

"While the IMF has a unique operational model, the problems they have encountered are similar to those faced by financial institutions around the world," said Jim Mancuso, General Manager, Financial Services Business Unit, Platform Computing. "Platform's experience with global banks will benefit the IMF and its member countries and underscores our commitment to advancing technological innovation and performance."