Distributed Portfolio and Investment Risk Analysis on Global Grids

The financial services industry today produces and consumes huge amounts of data and the processes involved in analysing these data are equally huge especially in terms of their complexity. The need to run these processes and analyse the data in time and get meaningful results can be met only up to a certain extent, by today’s computer systems. Most service providers are looking to increase efficiency and quality of their service offerings by stacking up more hardware and employing better algorithms for data processing. However, there is a limit to the gains achieved using such an approach. One viable alternative would be to use emerging disruptive technologies such as the Grid. Grid computing and its application to various domains have been actively studied by many groups for more than a decade now. In this paper we explore the use of the Grid in the financial services domain; an area which we believe has not been adequately looked into. 1