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JPMorgan Rolls Out FPGA Supercomputer
An anonymous reader writes "As heterogeneous computing starts to take off, JP Morgan have revealed they are using an FPGA based supercomputer to process risk on their credit portfolio. 'Prior to the implementation, JP Morgan would take eight hours to do a complete risk run, and an hour to run a present value, on its entire book. If anything went wrong with the analysis, there was no time to re-run it. It has now reduced that to about 238 seconds, with an FPGA time of 12 seconds.' Also mentioned is a Stanford talk given in May."
It fills the heart with inspiration to watch the best and brightest constructing advanced computers to solve the problems of mankind...
That will fix our banking system for sure!
Do not click. Some sort of phony coprophile spam.
Information asymmetry makes even the fastest analysis on the planet irrelevant as the data input is garbage. It is this lack of transparency which resulted in the housing bubble, etc.
The "too big to fail" banks regularly hide data from customers, regulators, and other branches of their own organization.
This is interesting because of the speedup of FPGAs, but don't be fooled by a second that it addresses an actual business need, other than PR.
That will fix our banking system for sure!
I can't agree more. An increase in the number of golf matches and accelerated round-robin tournament configuration would go a long way to keeping those pesky bank officials occupied on the links and safely out of their offices. The Florida Professional Golfers' Association will benefit while also helping protect our nation's assets from executive malfeasance.
...
Wait a minute, what are we talking about here?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It seems unlikely that they're doing anything that would prevent them from doing it significantly faster with less power draw on a GPU, and with lower initial hardware costs to boot.
No, FPGAs use significantly less power and provide greater performance than GPUs. The initial capital cost is higher though. Here's an article that gives a bit more detail: http://www.xilinx.com/publications/archives/xcell/issue74/FPGAs-speed-computation-complex-credit-derivatives.pdf
performance of the system, its architecture or its value to the company
and more impressed that one of the worlds largest financial service providers
partially responsible for the worlds second largest economic collapse has found, despite their
prior record with the concept of 'risk', the objective, quantifiable definition of the amorphous and
highly elusive concept of said 'risk.'
Good people go to bed earlier.
Note that Maxeler sold 20% of itself to JP Morgan earlier this year.
well as someone earlier posted, it's about making decisions faster than the competition. If they can analyze a transaction, assign a risk and make a decision faster, they make the money. If the competition also takes 8 hours to do an analysis, doing it in 3 min is huge. Who cares if it's outdated in 5 years? You build another with a fraction of the profits this one helped you earn you and keep chugging along.
sometimes, in some industries, first post IS important.
1 Virtex-6 SX475T could give you about 1 billion SHA-256 hashes/second clocked at 200MHz., will use 20% the power of the ATI GPU. but will cost about 4 times as much.
Sigs are for the weak.
For the new Maxeler system, it flattened the C++ code down to a Java code.
I hope to God that's a typo. C++ -> Java -> Java Bytecode -> Native code almost sounds like a programming language Rube Goldberg machine.
How would the pointer operations even translate?
The devs are going to run jobs while the machine is idle to corner the Bitcoin market.
But, wow, from the perspective of getting the Boss to buy awesome hardware for your pet projects - hey, we're not worthy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This technological breakthrough is an important milestone on the downfall of the mighty USA. When the brightest of a country are engaged into a completely nonproductive activity and wastes important resources (in terms of education, knowleddge and to some extent money) to achieve nothing which benefits the society, it's a high-mark - it's all downhill from here.
Let's come back here after 20 years and see how this comment stands up to time.
Weep, USA.
For me, it was pretty straightforward: Money, and opportunity. Software companies here in Australia tend not to gamble so much on fresh graduates, so the majority of opportunities that were attractive financially were in the consulting (Accenture, IBM, Infosys) or Financial space. As a poor student coming out of university, when I'm given the offers of $45k/yr vs. $60k/yr, plus bonuses, it's a pretty easy decision. Work hours tend not to be onerous, workplace conditions good, and the majority are in the main CBD. After a couple of years, experience and recruitment policies tend to railroad you into the industry unless you take a major step sideways.
That said, I'm always curious what "more productive areas" of work people consider to be out there for the average software engineer.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
I would positively love to do something like this. The purpose of an engineer is to solve problems. That's what makes me happy at work. Solving problems. So here you have a very specific problem that required the construction of a custom computer made out of banks of FPGAs. Tell me that's not sexy! Who cares if it's for bankers. That is a damn nifty gadget to work on building.
Imagine building it yourself. Switching networks, Linux on ARM cores peppered here and there coordinating and dumping program code to the FPGA banks, writing the drivers to grab the data once the run is completed...
And at the end of the day a problem solved: What once took all day now takes a couple of minutes.
This would have been a thoroughly nifty machine to work on.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
JP Morgan, along with every other mega-bank, has no idea what is actually on it's balance sheet, and hasn't for 10-20 years.
The Shadow Banking system is too big, too complicated, and too interconnected for any of these risk metrics to mean anything.
JP Morgan did the same business as Goldman Sachs and the others, loading up with CDOs and credit default swaps and CLOs and the rest of it. JPM is portrayed as 'wiser' than the rest in the books and the articles about the crisis, but its not really true. They were less stupid than the stupidest people, that doesnt make them smart.
They got bailed out just like all the other megabanks. Why? Because they had no idea what was on their books. They are running a black box. All the supercomputers in the world cannot make up for a complete and utter lack of transparency. And that is what the world of Credit Default Swaps (invented at JPM no less) are. A gigantic black box. The rest of the Shadow Banking system is the same, and JP Morgan (and the rest of the big banks) are up to their necks in it.
Just because you can calculate lies faster, doesnt mean they aren't lies.
there have been articles about the computer guys who were working inside the CDO machines of wall street in 2000-2008 before the whole thing came crashing down.
the only people who could hold their nose and not-care what their work was being used for are complete pscyopaths, who went through some kind of personality-cracking process so that they can act like normal people while they help destroy the planets economy.
if Morgan Stanley hadn't got bailed out by a Japanese bank, and if Bank of America hadn't bought Merrill, then Merrill would have failed, the Morgan, and Goldman and JPM would have fallen because of it.
Goldman's credit default swap business with AIG was also basically 100% bailed out by the taxpayer. Goldman would have lost massive amounts of money if it hadn't been for the deal the government gave them when it took over AIG.
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Mathless software?
That's like salt-free seasoning-salt, right?
Not that this justifies it, or that I disagree with you, but here in Australia the cost of living is vastly higher than the united states.
The US and AU dollars are at rough parity, but it goes a hell of a lot further in the US.
I think it was basically a pun on another meaning of the FPGA acronym.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.