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Terry Sandvik is convinced he's on to something big.
Sandvik, who's president of First Bank Systems Inc.'s Business Technology Center, has just started using a type of powerful mainframe computer called a cooperative multiprocessor. Not only does he expect it to save his institution huge amounts of money--but he's convinced that it also meets the industry's future computing needs.
The rapid development of electronic banking services--those that allow customers to pay bills from a home computer or withdraw cash from an automated teller on the other side of the world--are forcing banks' data processing facilities to play catch-up. Banks are being pressured to credit and debit accounts and balance their general ledgers instantaneously in what is called an "on-line, real-time" mode. "That's what the industry is moving toward," says Sandvik.
First Bank's new high-performance computer is an order of magnitude more powerful than the traditional mainframes and their decades-old batch-processing method. In that form of computing, transactions are "memo posted" throughout the day and balanced against the books overnight. Traditional mainframes simply weren't built to keep up with transactions throughout the day; high-performance systems are, and Sandvik hopes to make the most of that power.
Still, except for a few niche applications, high-performance computers are a largely unproven technology, particularly in industries such as banking. First Banks only bought its system--an IBM Corp. System/390 Parallel Transaction Server--earlier this year, so it doesn't have any experience with the system in actual day-to-day production. But Sandvik is optimistic. The machine was tested throughout the spring and summer, and it remained on schedule to start operation...