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."

Re:Pretty stupid approach.

[yodleboy]

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 Who cares if it's outdated in 5 years?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.

Weep, USA, weep!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Engineers solve problems

[Weaselmancer]

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.

imagine helping JPMorgan destroy the economy

[decora]

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.

Deutsche and Goldman almost bit the dust

[decora]

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.

.