Improving Scalability of Distributed Computing Environments

Richard Croucher, Barclays Bank

The banks have the most complex IT systems in the world.  Richard has worked on many of these and will focus on his most recent 4 years at Barclays which currently uses 60,000 servers and has around 21,000 IT employees.  Richard will briefly overview what all these computers are used for and the kind of jobs people in IT have. He will then provide the opportunity to ask questions

As well as Barclays, Richard has consulted on IT to HSBC, RBS, DeutscheBank, CreditSuisse, Flowtraders, JP. Morgan, Merril Lynch, Bank of America. He has also held senior Architecture positions with both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems and can contrast jobs in the Finance sector with working for large US technology companies.


Bio: Richard is a platform architect who specializes in high performance systems, including those used by financial institutions for high frequency trading and huge compute clusters with thousands of nodes used in the Cloud. Richard discovered Erlang and OTP three years ago and has adopted this as his platform of choice.   He has designed and helped build a large and complex Cloud based application using Erlang/OTP and has been exploring the design challenges of getting this to scale to millions of users for the last 12 months.

Richard is a multi-disciplinarian with experience across hardware, storage, network, operating systems, DevOps and systems programming.  He has to use all of these when designing a new platform. Over the years, he's programmed in Assembler, Basic, Fortran, Pascal,  C, C++, Java, C# and Erlang.  He has designed and built his own computers working at the chip level and designing his own circuit boards. Richard is currently VP of High Frequency Engineering at Barclays and has had previous roles as  Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems, Principle Architect at Microsoft (Azure).

Richard is a Fellow of STAC Research, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered IT Practitioner and holds degrees from Brunel University, the University of Berkshire and the University of East London.