On April 19, IBM hosted a panel discussion at the annual High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets Show and Conference in New York City. Jean Staten Healy, director of Linux strategy at IBM, moderated the panel of industry leaders whose discussion focused on high performance considerations beyond the cluster. She was joined by Tom Befi, vice president of information services at ISO; Feargal O'Sullivan, head of enterprise software at NYSE Technologies; Len Santalucia, CTO at Vicom Infinity; and Doug O'Flaherty, senior marketing manager at Red Hat.

The panel had a lively discussion on the varying definitions of "high performance." While it's easy to assume that high performance is primarily about how quickly a system can provide an answer, the panel discussed the other requirements that come along when implementing an enterprise-grade high performance application, such as reliability, uptime, determinism and latency, scale, and the total cost of getting to an answer. A key theme in the discussion was the ability of Linux to run on all IBM architectures, which provides substantial flexibility when choosing the optimal architecture for a high performance workload.