Schwab Deploys Linux-based Grid

Charles Schwab & Co. last month went live with a Linux-based grid computing system in an effort to speed up some
of its compute-intensive investment management applications.

David Dibble, executive vice president of technology services at Schwab, said the grid system was jointly developed with IBM and currently connects 12
two-processor servers that are based on Intel chips and located in the discount brokerage’s Phoenix data center. Later this year, San Francisco-based
Schwab plans to begin rolling out the grid technology across a thousand or more low-cost servers with spare CPU capacity that could be tapped to help
boost application performance.

Dibble wouldn’t disclose the cost of the project or the throughput that Schwab has achieved on an initial retirement planning application, citing the
performance levels as a competitive advantage. But he said the system lets Schwab turn around end-user requests for retirement planning data in
seconds instead of days.