JPMorgan Rolls Out (Another) FPGA Supercomputer

An anonymous reader writes "JP Morgan is expanding its use of dataflow supercomputers to speed up more of its fixed income trading operations. Earlier this year, the bank revealed how it reduced the time it took to run an end-of-day risk calculation from eight hours down to just 238 seconds. The new dataflow supercomputer, where the computer chips are tailored to perform specific, bespoke tasks (as explained in this Wall Street Journal article) — will be equivalent to more than 12,000 conventional x86 cores, providing 128 Teraflops of performance."

Comments

All this..

[ackthpt]

So they can project how much money to borrow from the Federal Government the next time they have lent beyond sane limits to property speculators or invested in schemes even Mandelbrot wouldn't be able to simulate.

Re:All this..

[ackthpt]

Let's hope the federal government regulators are paying attention this time.

It would suck for them to be confused by the cool new computer and unable to seperate systemic or institutional risk from faster calculating devices.

Wishful thinking. Wall Street moves at the Speed of Light with all these computer trades now. Federal regulators need a super computer to keep an eye on JPMorgan, et al.

"You were insolvent 23 times today, for a total of 3.77 seconds. Federal guidelines mandate not being insolvent more than 15 times per day, over 1.78 seconds."

Re:All this..

[iluvcapra]

"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way with his fellows, so that no-one can really blame him."

--- John Maynard Keynes

Re:All this..

[Beeftopia]

1. regulators are bought and paid for, besides they are not the brightest of the pack - if they were they would be farming gold on wallstreet themselves 2. regulations are always looking backwards at the last crisis, never predict origins of the next one 3. when everything is leveraged 30-50x there is nothing you can do to provide stability that is not make-believe 4. you don't need fancy regulation to crack down on good ol' fraud, you just make it harder for small players to comply

When things are going great, no one wants to change ANYTHING, no matter how outrageous, for fear of upsetting the apple cart and ending the party.

When things go bad, only then are people willing to change. Except of course, those still engaging in outrageous practices, as they are still making money.

As far as regulators being dim, sometimes that's true, sometimes not. IMHO, the far greater problem is the muzzling and influencing of regulators by the industries they are tasked to regulate via the politicians owned by those industries.

238 seconds is about 4 minutes

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

for all you people who don't really think in seconds when seconds is > 60.

too bad

[Khashishi]

These banks aren't just siphoning money, they are also siphoning talent away from more important projects. The people working on these things could be brilliant physicists or engineers, if they weren't sucked into the dark side.

Re:risk vs. electricity

[viperidaenz]

using FPGA's instead of x86 would probably consume a significant amount less electricity. using manpower is good in terms of the many men being paid for their efforts instead or a few ceos just pocketing the money as extra bonuses

FPGAs as coprocessors?

[Targen]

This story got me thinking that many of the tasks routinely executed on personal computers (perhaps cryptography, video decoding, and such) may benefit from including a FPGA in PCs to serve as a programmable coprocessor. Much like graphics-intensive software can come with shader code to offload processing to the GPU, couldn't a video codec or an implementation of SSL or whatever come with code that would allow an FPGA to do part of the work?

I googled around and found that at least CERN has done something of the sort, but that was over seven years ago. There was a story on Slashdot about something of this sort, but it's even older than the CERN publication. Is anyone working on this sort of idea? If not, why? Is it simply a matter of cost, or is there some other issue that makes this impractical?

Maybe I just suck at googling...

Kudos to the JPMC engineers!

[msobkow]

I spent two great years working for J. P. Morgan Chase, starting in 1999, followed by a year with the merged JPMC, so I have some knowledge of how this new system will be used and how it fits into the business process of running a bank. I can't discuss details about that, but I just wanted to share my congratulations with the JPMC team for tackling that thorny issue.

You have to understand that investments can't be made until those risk analyses are done, so cutting 7-8 hours off the run time will earn the company millions over the course of a year. We're talking about the kind of investment loans where even a 4-5 hour overnight "float" of capital to help someone seal a bigger deal can be worth a significant amount of interest and profit.

Remember: the big investment banks are dealing with numbers that cause spreadsheets to overflow. You can't even visualize the data with standard desktop tools. You wouldn't believe the totals I saw come out of some reports, and I wish I could forget them. Such numbers are not meant for the grasp of mere humans living on a working wage.

Re:Kudos to the JPMC engineers!

[zill]

Remember: the big investment banks are dealing with numbers that cause spreadsheets to overflow.

Wow! They're using more than 65536 rows? Impressive!