[Condor-users] Condor at bank Banesto

[Santiago Portela García-Miguel <sportela@xxxxxx>]

We are proud to anounce that since september 2006 Banesto (one of  three
major banks in Spain) uses Condor for financial calculations at Treasure
department. We demonstrated the viability of the project in february-06
and we helped Banesto analysts to migrate their Montecarlo simulations to
the new distributed architecture.

The current pool is a blade system of 50 AMD 64bits dual processor, dual
core. Actually the time it takes to evaluate each portfolio has been
reduced around 75% and the capacity has been multiplied by 20. The cost
ratio has been reduced from 44 Euros per Gigaflop with the previous system
(monolithic SMP) to 4 Euros per Gigaflop.

We developped web graphical monitors for Condor which will be released as
Open Source to the Condor community as soon as we could package them. It's
a python web server which works on both windows and linux. It also do not
need apache, it can just be launched as a script but it can also be
integrated with apache using mod_python. You can see an example at
http://uaxgrid.cediant.es. We are currently working on the monitor, so
it's not a final release, but it's a quite stable release.

One very intersting point was the reduction of latency time. We coded
ourserlves into the Condor code on version 6.6.10, but new stable Condor
releases (6.8.X) allows to change it with the NEGOTIATOR_CYCLE_DELAY
variable. Since Banesto uses dedicated computers on a Gigabit network,
there is no risk of overlapp the matching mecanism.

We describe our experience at our web  http://www.cediant.es. It's
currently only in spanish, but we think it may be interesting to someone
to have notice about the Banesto deployment process, so we are working on
an english translation.

Cediant is a private R&D center at University Alfonso X el Sabio at Madrid
(Spain). We offer professional support for Condor and other distributed
systems, and consultancy on clustering, grid, virtualization and related
technologies.

We wish to Thank the Condor Developer Team for their work and also to the
Condor community for their support. If you want to know more things about
the deployment or about the monitor do not hesitate to contact us.

Santiago Portela & Carlos Manzanedo
condor@xxxxxxxxxx
www.cediant.es
www.uax.es