IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization provides the ability to off-load function calls in a computationally intensive application to a remote, high-performance computation node, thereby significantly reducing time to deployment, with minimal code changes and disruption to business.
In financial services, IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization can help developers to quickly deploy new applications that take advantage of accelerated math libraries running on new or remote hardware systems. In particular, where original applications were not written to offload calculations to remote hardware, IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization can be used to prepare the application for invoking remote libraries, thereby avoiding a re-writing or customization of the original code base.
Specifically, this technology can cut down overall time to deployment for business-critical applications that require ultra-high speed and low latency; such applications include options pricing (for example, Monte Carlo simulations) and FIX message parsing. In the past, such applications may have required significant application development time, prolonging the potential for a return on new investment, sometimes making the project cost-prohibitive. By using IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization to call the remotely deployed application functions residing on a high-performance computation node, combined with the low-latency infrastructure provided by IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization, application calculation times can also be reduced.
The technology virtualizes application libraries by examining the library's exported functions and capturing additional semantics. Library functions, when invoked from an application, appear to be executed locally, insulating developers from the specifics of the computation node and reducing the effort of grid-enabling the application.
IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization supports applications written in C/C++ and Excel spreadsheets (Visual Basic Application (VBA)), and it harnesses the power of the IBM BladeCenter® QS2X with Cell Broadband Engine™. The technology promotes heterogeneous adaptation; that is, it allows client applications running on one architecture (such as Intel®/Windows® XP) to execute functions hosted on a different architecture (such as Cell Broadband Engine).
How does it work?
IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization consists of an Eclipse plug-in called Tooling that virtualizes an application library by generating the appropriate client- and server-side code from the library specification (a C .h file).
The Eclipse CDT is used to parse the customer library header file, and the user specifies additional semantics (such as array lengths). The Tooling component of IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization allows the generated client-side code to be linked with the client application, it builds the server-side code, and then this server-side code is deployed to the computation node.
The client-side code then prepares a computational request and sends it to a grid computation node, which passes the function parameters to the generated server-side code. This generated server-side code invokes the application library to perform the actual computation. On completion, the result is sent back to the client application through the client-side generated code.
The computation node is then free to process further requests. The low-latency infrastructural component permits a heterogeneous operating system and client run-time deployment.
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