Windows Azure and HPC
Save Time and Money with Faster Derivative Calculations in the Cloud
Managing risk and valuing complex derivative portfolios on a daily basis has proved to be challenging and computationally intensive.Together, Numerix and Microsoft have successfully addressed real time trading and risk demands and “Big Data” requirements by helping financial services firms burst pricing and risk calculations to the Cloud with Numerix CrossAsset and Numerix Portfolio on Windows Azure and Windows HPC Server.
Faster calculations save customers significantly large amounts of time and money. By arriving at the right answer faster, financial institutions can respond more quickly and accurately to changing market dynamics as they manage their derivative portfolios. Insurers get the consistent valuation and analytical capabilities they need, not only for pricing and structuring variable annuity products, but also for measuring value-at-risk and other risk factors as well as for asset and liability management.
Numerix analytics can take advantage of your firm's private or public cloud computing infrastructure to produce pricing and risk reports for even the largest and most complex derivative portfolios faster.
- Accelerate derivative calculations distributed over an internal grid or public cloud infrastructure
- Perform rapid and consistent risk calculations for both hedges and underlying assets
- Improve systems productivity, interoperability and full transparency
- Perform rapid unified risk calculations for complex derivatives portfolios
- Run multiple instances of Excel spreadsheets on Windows Azure or an HPC Cluster
- Run and distribute Excel-based computations for an entire portfolio
- Gain optimized, high level of performance for batch reporting—with scalability for even the largest jobs
Windows Azure and Windows HPC Server
Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
Windows Azure enables you to easily scale your applications to any size. It is a fully automated self-service platform that allows you to provision resources within minutes. Elastically grow or shrink your resource usage based on your needs. You only pay for the resources your application uses. Windows Azure is available in multiple datacenters around the world, enabling you to deploy your applications close to your customers. A 99.95% monthly SLA enables you to build and run highly available applications without focusing on the infrastructure.
Windows Azure HPC Scheduler makes it easy to migrate and build compute-intensive parallel applications in Windows Azure. In addition, it enables you to run virtual nodes on-demand in the cloud, thus providing access to computing resources to handle peak or unpredictable workloads. So you can use smaller on-premise clusters and rely on Windows Azure to provide additional scale when required.
Numerix Cloud-Enabled Solutions
Numerix CrossAsset XL 
Users can take advantage of Windows Azure and Windows HPC Server implementations to burst Excel calculations to the cloud, distribute them across a grid, or a combination of both private and public compute environments. This enables scaling and calculation speed-up, it lowers TCO through the use of shared compute resources. It also enables job isolation, auditing/accounting support, and improved resource management.
Numerix Portfolio
The configuration of the scripts for Windows Azure and Windows HPC Server enables the cluster to schedule times and nodes for running Numerix Portfolio processes in the cloud, across a grid, or a combination of both private and public compute environments. This lowers TCO and enables organizations to scale to meet the demands of more frequent, complex calculations. The asynchronous queuing of report-generation jobs within Numerix Portfolio is also fully integrated with the Windows Azure and Windows HPC Server platform, so reports run faster.
