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The Almighty Buck

JPMorgan Rolls Out (Another) FPGA Supercomputer->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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."
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Comment: Re:Exciting! (Score 3, Funny) 199

by HateBreeder (#38184880) Attached to: Huge Tesla Coils Will Recreate Natural Lightning

I will never forgive the SyFy channel for perverting the spelling of "Sci-Fi".
Not to mention killing off Stargate... or any decent show for that matter. We're now stuck with rubbish like Eureka.
Maybe they've done some surveys and decided that their target audience should actually be a bunch of retards.

Comment: Re:Pretty stupid approach. (Score 1) 194

by HateBreeder (#36728410) Attached to: JPMorgan Rolls Out FPGA Supercomputer

I think you're underestimating the bank.

The cost of this solution might have been low enough to warrant the immediate gains in performance.
The lock-in you describe might not exist, as the algorithms and the accelerated bits are a small portion of the entire code-base (but take 99% of the run-time).
It will very likely be the case that the cost of not going with this solution is far far greater than going for it.

Comment: Re:Could they not use GPUs? (Score 1) 194

by HateBreeder (#36728360) Attached to: JPMorgan Rolls Out FPGA Supercomputer

GPUs are much more power hungry compared to FPGA and provide a fraction of the performance.

At the end of the day, GPUs are designed for gaming machines... the whole GPGPU thing is a side show for the graphics market. It's just not optimized in any way for this sort of computation. There's little money to be made building supercomputers compared to selling gaming machines.

However, an FPGA can be completely customized to suit your exact needs, you will make efficient use of the entire chip. It won't be a mere coincidence (like in the GPU case) that the chip can be used for a computation that you need. The FPGA is customized directly to fit an algorithm. this efficiency is where the speed gains are made.

It seems people put a lot of effort in to making their software compatible with GPUs and changing their algorithms to fit the GPU model.. this is a distorted view of reality - it is the computer that needs and can change to suit the problem, not the other way around.

To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.

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