Lecture Notes: Financial Services Grid Computing on AWS

Introduction

• Financial services organizations utilize HPC grids for risk calculation, portfolio valuation, and regulatory reporting.
• Challenges: Scale, cost, and complexity of HPC infrastructure.
• AWS provides solutions to enhance capabilities, reduce costs, and speed up processes compared to on-premises resources.

Audience

• Grid computing managers, architects, and engineers in financial services.

Overview of HPC in Financial Services

• HPC demand is growing across retail, commercial, and investment sectors with cost constraints.
• Evolution: Centralized solutions → Commodity hardware clusters → Multi-tenant grid architectures.
• Cloud offers new models: Capacity on Demand and Pay as You Go.
  • Models: Bursting (augment existing capacity with cloud) and Lift and Shift (deploy new clusters in cloud).
  • Cloud model shifts focus from managing demand to optimizing supply.
  • Benefits: Granular decision-making, immediate processing, and scalability.

Cloud Migration and Emerging Trends

• Initial cloud migrations extend on-premises grids.
• Emerging themes:
  • Open-source Linux systems and ARM-based CPUs with AWS Graviton.
  • AI/ML techniques with Amazon SageMaker for predictive risk models.
  • Serverless scheduling and orchestration with HTC-Grid project.
• Data-heavy calculations with Amazon EMR using DAG structures.
• Migration of risk management systems alongside compute grids.
• Native sourcing of data through AWS Data Exchange.
• Serverless risk management using AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions.

Are You Well-Architected?

• AWS Well-Architected Framework: Six pillars for designing reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems.
• AWS Well-Architected Tool: Review workloads against best practices.
• Resources: AWS Architecture Center for diagrams and whitepapers.

Lenses

• Financial Services Industry Lens: Best practices for financial services workloads.
• HPC Lens: Best practices for HPC workloads on AWS.

Conclusion

• AWS provides numerous services and frameworks to improve HPC in financial services.
• Emphasis on serverless architectures and cloud-native solutions.
• The importance of following best practices for sustainable and efficient system design.