B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

480 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
addition, with the use of a network of computers, businesses can
logically distribute large computational jobs across several computers
and the results can be shared directly among participating peers.
Through the use of computing resources untapped in the past, which
reduce the load on main servers and allow them to perform specialized
services, organizations can dramatically lower the processing costs and
speed up the process completion times.
DATASYNAPSE SPREADING THE COMPUTING POWER
DataSynapse helps customers harness idle and underused computing
power in their network. They provide a product called WebProc*,
which is a peer-to-peer platform for distributing compute-intensive
application processes to idle and underutilized resources. The solution
does not discriminate, based on whether the resources are in rackmounted
servers or high-performance desktop PCs. As long as they're
on the enterprise network, WebProc will use them to perform
demanding processing tasks.
The solution integrates easily with the corporation's existing
network environment. Employees never notice that WebProc is
working, because it only takes control of a desktop PC when that
PC is idle. Should a worker return to his desk during a computation,
WebProc immediately interrupts the processing task and reroutes it to
another idle system.
The results of the DataSynapse WebProc solution are impressive.
In one installation at a retail banking corporation, where crunching
complex derivatives contracts requires a lot of power, performance
improved by a factor of 80. Baseline time to process 200 trades on an
existing server was 44 minutes. By distributing those computations
across 100 Intel®-based PCs, the job finished in 33 seconds.
Completing such jobs faster is invaluable to a financial services
company. It can boost the productivity of traders, allow a bank to
react more swiftly to abrupt economic changes and generally increase
the number of trades a company can conduct. What's more, scaling
Continue on page 481