Citigroup Moves HPC to Grid, Cuts Jobs

Citigroup announced Wednesday that it would be cutting 17,000 jobs as part of a broader restructuring designed to save the company $10 billion. The huge bank is likely to consolidate some of its data centers as part of this effort, according to Network World. This comes at a time when many large financial institutions are building new data centers. HSBC, for example, is building major new facilities in New Jersey and New York state as part of a broader data center construction program.

Citigroup has more than 50 data centers, which no doubt offers some opportunities to consolidate. An interesting wrinkle: Citigroup is in the middle of a major shift in its approach to high-performance computing, moving from clustered servers to a large-scale grid, according to a recent story at Wall Street & Technology. An excerpt:

Read more at Wall Street & Technology, which also has an interesting piece on the financial industry's growing focus on high-performance computing and the infrastructure challenges that accompany it (link via Paul Kedrosky).