Toronto-Dominion Bank plans to use International Business Machines Corp.'s Blue Gene supercomputer to study complex financial conditions.
"Our business, which is the capital markets domain, is becoming more and more about managing and analyzing large amounts of data, and the current market conditions are definitely pushing the boundaries of traditional technology," Rizwan Khalfan, the chief information officer of TD Wholesale Bank, said in an interview.
He said it will take eight to 12 months to install the supercomputer. IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., said Toronto-Dominion will be the first financial services company to use Blue Gene.
Because of the crisis in the credit markets, Mr. Khalfan said, "the amount of data that you're processing to manage client demands against the liquidity is getting larger and larger almost on an exponential basis."
The increasing abundance of information in digital form may soon approach the limits of what TD's current hardware can handle. "Financial services has always been about information. Now information is available to everybody on a real-time basis," Mr. Khalfan said. "To create value, you have to be able to analyze this."
As those technology demands increase, he said, "we will be straining the traditional technology that's in place right now, so you're better off thinking ahead."
IBM, which announced the deal last week, said Toronto-Dominion's data analysis needs are outgrowing its in-house systems' capacity. "They're at their architectural limit," said Nagui Halim, the chief scientist of IBM's stream computing project.
Stream computing lets organizations quickly analyze vast amounts of data. "If the performance requirements are extreme, you're going to require extreme hardware," Mr. Halim said.
Though Toronto-Dominion is the first financial company under contract to use Blue Gene, IBM is is marketing the supercomputer to other financial institutions, Mr. Halim said. "We think we can actually change the game of how these banks do business."
