JPMorgan Rolls Out (Another) FPGA Supercomputer 210
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."
All this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:All this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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If you can't run a sanity check over what your computers are doing, you aren't an engineer or administrator. You are a message boy, slave to the computer and to who really understands what's going on.
That and Washington is too cozy with Wall Street (Score:3)
and they do their damn best to keep it quiet. Look at how quickly stories about Congress and their staffs using insider information was quashed. It went from being front page to gone in days, as if it didn't exist. Similar to how Fast and Furious vanished.
We need an OKS, Occupy K-Street, Wall Street is fully enabled by Washington. They just pay their dues and Washington insiders reap the real rewards.
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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
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Re:All this.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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We used to believe in regulations, which is why the meat in your freezer is edible. See, it does work.
But then the neoliberals moved in, and the Republicans were overtaken with faith-based economics, and now, regulations are the bane of everything good.
Brooksley Borne was just one [pbs.org] of many people who predicted the financial meltdown. She was shut down by people who really believed that regulations are bad.
Regulatory capture is only part of the problem.
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if they were they would be farming gold on wallstreet themselves
Why would the regulators do the job someone in China could do for a lot less? I mean, we don't even know if they like playing World of WarCraft, let alone whether they want to grind for gold.
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"4. you don't need fancy regulation to crack down on good ol' fraud, you just make it harder for small players to comply"
It wouldn't help anyways if federal prosecutors don't actually do anything about it. The number of Sarbox related lawsuits as a result of the latest crisisis? I think its bordering on 0.
Re:All this.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, the technology to rapidly reconfigure FPGAs for specific tasks could have a lot of applications. I guess the obvious question is whether the FPGA approach can win over mass-produced general purpose CPUs (the article says yes), and also over GPUs, which are increasingly general-purpose SIMD units.
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they're trying to avoid getting into trouble in the first place.
No, they're looking to avoid getting into the kind of trouble they a) comprehend and b) actually care about. It's all the other kinds of trouble that are wreaking havoc with this country and planet right now.
Re:All this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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
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That's a terrible analogy, doesn't make sense at all.
Now, if it was they can't find the body, because of all the other bodies, due to everybody murdering, then it would make sense, but loses its punch.
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The real problem with reconfigurable computing isn't bus contention (that can be solved easily with a good system architecture). The problem with it is programmability. Let's say I want to sum an array in C. All I do is write a for() loop and add up the array. 2 lines of code.
Now, to do it on an FPGA in Verilog, I need: a functional block that's an adder, registers to store the sum, a RAM with addressing and output enables (etc) to store the array, a clock (or maybe more than one if the RAM timing is d
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First off HDL vs. C or other HHL's is an apples to oranges comparison. There are ways to program an FPGA using C, but I believe it involves using soft CPU cores as a library of sort. You don't compile the C directly into an FPGA, but rather wrap a soft CPU core around it and then generate the HDL code. That or you just upload a soft cpu core and program that. I may be wrong but that is how it works from my understanding.
Second, most users are not going to write an entire configurable computing HDL design fr
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Look at it the other way, by rapidly exploring lots of different risk profiles, they're trying to avoid getting into trouble in the first place.
Oh my goodness, how naive you are. To 'make' money, all the financial industry needs to do is to add extra zeros before the decimal point to their account balances. Problem is they can't do that so easily -- this is something they still can't get away with. So they have come up with all of these 'financial instruments' and 'trading systems' where they shuffle shit around between themselves and their accounts, producing no true value or real wealth, but somehow still end up with extra zeros before the decima
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That's really what you meant to say, right? Right?
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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.
No, it's just fun building excessively expensive crap to justify your trading profits and look like you're "cutting edge." The only edge they are cutting is any shred of "all men are created equal" left in this country.
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They did not do the actual loans. They just packaged them up into mortgage backed securities that they (presumably) knew they were going to fail.
238 seconds is about 4 minutes (Score:5, Funny)
for all you people who don't really think in seconds when seconds is > 60.
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for all you people who don't really think in seconds when seconds is > 60.
Put that sucker in the Crimson Assurance and it would go like the Space Shuttle!
right through the main feature and a dozen other screens in the cineplex as well!
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too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Correct. Do you think they are? That would almost certainly be in violation of their contracts...
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Ah, so JP Morgan is labotamizing them upon termination. Now that is evil !
I've seen some contracts to that effect (not work for any competing firm or use, in any way, technology developed at the company for a period of 10 years after termination)... they told me it was standard, I told them it was my standard policy to not sign idiotic crap like that, they hired me anyway.
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I mean, the microprocessor itself started out as military technology,
Only indirectly, since the first CPUs (from Intel, TI and General Instruments) all powered calculators.
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My bad...
s/first CPUs/first microprocessor CPUs/
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Your original post was:
Using the source code is almost certainly against your contract, since it almost certainly becomes property of your employer. It doesn't take a lobotomy...
In any case, I think relatively few people go into science from Wall Street. Once you're fed up with it, it's often too late to go into grad school. Instead, they probably get a j
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Re:too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
You think people that work on this stuff have anything in mind beyond personal enrichment?
Believe me, I know a guy that does some of this stuff. His opinions are that corporate morals are unnecessary, that we can't and shouldn't seek to blame or look negatively on companies for seeking profit without regard to the social, environmental or other costs, and that open source is basically hippie communism.
We used to argue about that sort of stuff quite a lot until I stopped speaking to him.
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Well, open source is basically hippie communism.
No, not really. Or yes, if you like. It can be considered from a whole variety of points of view from capitilistic such as loss leader (BSD license) or payment in kind (GLP)) to hippy communism to apolitical self interest. Redhat's $903 million revenue seems far divorced from hippy communism to me. RMS is certainly political but more in a revolutionary way to overturn the status quo than peace and love hippyism.
The thing is that for may problems going open so
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Economics Ph's gotta eat too y'a know.
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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.
It's not even dollars and cents. Hasn't been for years. It's points. It's all virtual and simply points. Just like whacking a goblin in some game, they're keeping score, not minding money.
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If these algorithms are profitable they ultimately buy low and sell high, which is good for society. When you buy low, you're providing cash to those who need it most (therefore the willingness to sell low) and when you sell high, you provide the asset when it's needed most. Essentially, a profitable trader (computer or not) helps moderate markets by preventing them from going too low or too high, and pricing things correctly is important to society because resources are allocated by price. I know it's trendy to bash finance but it has an important function in society.
What you described is how trading SHOULD work, where a trader holds a certain stock for at least hours or days.
You are correct that this is good and stabilises things.
How it actually seems to happen these days is computers buy stocks on minor fluctuations, then sell them on another fluctuation a couple of microseconds later.
That doesn't seem to provide any useful function to me.
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The strange thing about your characterisation of the "business cycle" is the reliance on governments influencing the markets. This seems to me to be one of the best arguments for small-government liberal capitalism that I have heard - doubtless the opposite of what you intended.
The fact remains that in any system, capital has to be found to allow business to flourish, and the more technologically advanced the society, the more capital is required.
The ability to process complex risk calculations very quic
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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.
But, the dark side is filled with shiny baubles - why take a conventional job for $85K when you can start with a financial firm at $135K? That's a Porsche in the garage on day one, upgraded to a Ferrari after the 2 year lease is up. With conspicuous consumption like that, the vacuous model types start paying attention to you - what 20-something genius doesn't want that?
So... what? (Score:2)
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You can get petaflops with a fraction of 12,000's x86 price, just use GPUs...
Mrs. Schwartz, we've .. eh heh .. there's been some problems with the computers lately .. eh heh .. but rest assured, Mrs. Schwartz, we will have it all sorted out very soon and not a penny will be out of place .. eh heh .. just as soon as we figure how your checking account came to have a balance of $7,404.06 and .. eh heh .. oh my .. and 12 Klingons. What a dreadful day this has been. Oh, and in case you were considering transfering to another institution .. eh heh .. Bank of America's journals are inf
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What they are after is minimal lag in computation - at some point, the FPGAs will win this over standard CPUs or GPUs, all you need is cubic dollars to fund them, and, if you haven't noticed, cubic dollars is their business.
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GPU ALU have a limited set of operations. Their calculation probably uses operations outside of that set.
That's OK, because with the volume of dollars now on the move it's no longer GAAP, but quantum.
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ALU * clock is meaningless measure. Hardware scales easily, code does not.
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FPGAs as coprocessors? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [cdsweb.cern.ch], but that was over seven years ago. There was a story on Slashdot [slashdot.org] 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...
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://www.xtremedata.com/technology/parallel-architecture [xtremedata.com]
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Intel has supported socket-connected FPGAs for years now. A few vendors (including xtremedata and nallatech) offer(ed) FSB-attached FPGAs. Pactron (with Altera FPGAs) and Xilinx are offering QPI-attached FPGAs on the Nehalem/Westmere -EX platform and have announced support for Sandy Bridge.
I work for Intel on these technologies.
Re:FPGAs as coprocessors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite a few supercomputers on top500 have the above mentioned configuration. JPMorgan is very late to the party.
You're probably wondering why every desktop, laptop, and smartphone doesn't come with this wonderful technology already, and there are many many reasons for that:
- FPGA programming is difficult, and it's a much rarer talent than software programming
- The FPGA industry is currently a duopoly and combined that with the small market of FPGAs means that the price is too high for consumer electronics
- Specialized functionality can always be more cheaply implemented in ASICs (cryptographic co-processors, new instructions in CPUs, H264 decoding ASICs)
- The chicken and egg problem. Developers won't start hiring FPGA programmers en masse until there are enough machines out there with FPGA co-processors installed. And people won't start buying FPGA co-processors until their favorite program supported co-processor acceleration.
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JPMorgan is indeed one of the first places to mass deploy clusters with FPGA co-processors. The technology isn't new per se, but they are still pioneers in terms of scale.
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In electronics a large part of the cost is upfront so niche products are FAR more expensive than common products of similar complexity. This applies to some extent to assemblies (compare the cost of a PXIe controller module to the cost of a laptop for example) and applies to an even greater extent to semiconductor products.
Powerful FPGAs are a niche product and hence expensive. GPUs are a mass market product and hence cheap. So if a GPU can do your calculations reasonablly efficiently it's probablly the che
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We use FPGAs to do custom video pipelines alongside our processor cores, we don't, as a general rule, reconfigure them very often, because that takes lots and lots of testing to make sure you haven't screwed up, but the flexibility does allow us to move forward without fully specifying the hardware at an early stage.
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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?
Yes but decent-sized FPGAs are crazy expensive.
It is false that FPGAs consume less power, they are power hogs and are slow (max 200-300 mhz). Neither are there because of their reconfiguration powers.
They are used because of the bandwidth. Specifically, memory bandwidth. CPUs are just big state-machines that can read from DRAM 64 bits at the time. Not many algorithms are optimized for that. But you can optimally implement every algorithm on a FPGA, and gains are usually tremendous, even with a slow, hot and
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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?
Xilinx (one of the two big FPGA companies) very recently released their "Zynq" family of combined CPU+FPGAs. They contain a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 running at 800 MHz and a pretty decent amount of 28nm FPGA logic, with interconnects between the two. That is basically what you are describing I think.
http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/epp/zynq-7000/index.htm [xilinx.com]
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Actually, almost all FPGAs are SRAM-based and reconfigure (program) themselves every time they power on. The biggest problem is the compiler tools themselves (the Xilinx tools are pretty horrid all things considered).
Will be interesting to see how long it takes them to move to GPUs. They aren't as flexible but the raw amount of computing power is much cheaper. Then again, we're talking about banks, heh
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The move to GPU's won't happen in HPC circles. However the move of OpenCL to FPGAs is happening:
http://www.altera.com/corporate/news_room/releases/2011/products/nr-opencl.html [altera.com]
Kudos to the JPMC engineers! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
And just think, replying to that programming school on the matchbook cover and adding a little clause of code to catch the fractions beyond cents could have you living on Long Island in a pleasant estate in about half a second of activity. -- Superman movie reference.
Re:Kudos to the JPMC engineers! (Score:5, Funny)
Remember: the big investment banks are dealing with numbers that cause spreadsheets to overflow.
Wow! They're using more than 65536 rows? Impressive!
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the big investment banks are dealing with numbers that cause spreadsheets to overflow
so last century. Excel 2007 and 2010 have no such limitations. which is a good thing because I sometimes generate datasets too big for the older versions to handle.
1999, before the first Synthetic CDO was sold? (Score:2, Redundant)
before credit default swaps grew to dozens-of-trillions of dollars business?
before Commodity Index Funds?
before the stock exchanges and commodities exchanges got rid of their open outcry trading pits and went electronic?
before JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns (with a Fed loan)?
before JP Morgan got bailed out by taxpayers?
no offense dude... but what on earth does 1999 have to do with 2011?
So JP Morgan can calculate VaR faster. so what? they didnt calculate it fast enough in 2008 - they took that big fat payout
Re:1999, before the first Synthetic CDO was sold? (Score:4, Interesting)
*sigh*
The problems the risk analysis team faced even in the 2000 era was such a tough nut to crack that they had to limit the complexity of the algorithms they used just because there wasn't hardware powerful enough.
All the things you mentioned have only added to that complexity, making the calculations that much worse and that much more expensive.
So instead of making me change my mind, you just made me realize how much more impressive their achievement was than I first thought.
Spreadsheets back then did not have arbitrary precision decimal or integer values -- they used floating point. I have no idea whether newer spreadsheets have shifted to arbitrary precision values or not, but if they haven't the spreadsheets blow up.
Remember: little companies like GE, GM, and Exxon are the kind of customers who have deposits with an investment bank. As a result, numbers like total deposits held blow floating point values out of the water by a significant margin. The amount of money floating around the world really does generate some stunning sequences of digits, they're almost magically long numbers like the nth digit of Pi. They just don't register as "billions" or "trillions" automatically, you have to count the digits and think a moment about what that number is supposed to be called. :D
Re:1999, before the first Synthetic CDO was sold? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problems the risk analysis team faced even in the 2000 era was such a tough nut to crack that they had to limit the complexity of the algorithms they used just because there wasn't hardware powerful enough.
Look, the problem here is the black swan. You can't model a black swan unless you can simulate the entire world economy down to the last neuron in some farmer's brain in a rural Chinese village. Right now we can't model a single human brain let alone all of them.
The world economy didn't melt down because some spreadsheet only calculated 12 decimal places when it should have calculated 325. It melted down because everybody decided to leverage themselves 100x on the bet that housing prices wouldn't ever go down, and they did. Now the world governments are starting to leverage themselves in small multiples on the bet that nobody would ever stop buying their bonds, mostly to bail out the bankers who bet on housing prices. I don't need arbitrary precision arithmetic to tell you where that is going to end up if it doesn't change FAST.
Let the looting begin! (Score:3)
Now JP Morgan can raid future MF Globals all that much faster, while hiding their shenanigans at the COMEX.
Bitcoin Miner! (Score:2)
Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:2)
What a waste. These banks can build the most impressive hardware in the world, perform calculations in the petaflops, and still have absolutely no clue what risk is involved in the business they're doing because their assumptions and data are all wrong. If by some freak accident they were to get the right answer, they would conceal it from their clients and investors anyway because their incentive is to take big risks - they get enormous rewards if they are right and lose little if they are wrong. They are
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Re:risk vs. electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:risk vs. electricity (Score:4, Interesting)
More importantly, it makes it impossible for anyone to dispute their results. After all, no one else has exactly the same system so no one is better qualified to evaluate their conclusions. "No, we made the best possible choice at the time. You would know that if you had OUR analytic engine, but since you don't your speculations are baseless."
Re:risk vs. electricity (Score:4, Interesting)
How much money are they spending in manpower, electricity and consumables by calculating risk? how about make a super computer to figure out how to solve the world debt.
Everyone knows the answer to that question already. Learn to live with less resources for each person, or figure out how to have less people.
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Migrating algorithms from C++ to FPGAs involves doing a Fourier Transform from time domain
execution to spatial domain execution in order to maximize computational throughput.
What the hell is this supposed to mean? The document seems like the standard FPGA boilerplate otherwise, great for showing to management.
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Translation (probably):
"We make things run in parallel".
Doesn't sound so impressive though does it!
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It is a FPGA supercomputer, don't you need to reconfigure it first?
Story misses details on Maxeler hardware (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, both stories lack details on how the FPGAs are used in the computing architecture. Instead the spend great lengths on listing telephone number like, meaningless speedup comparisons with conventional hardware. A typical drawback of FPGAs is that they cannot accommodate as many floating point units (FPUs) per chip as current GPUs and that FPGAs run at about 10x lower clock speeds. Their advantage however, is that the internal chip architecture can be reconfigured to match the algorithm, so that all FP
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Amen... now that I understand rehypothecation, (having cake, borrowing against same cake, borrowing (again) against same cake... an unlimited number of times, then eating cake, is all legal thanks to "the city of london")
Any company with a division or branch in England can use this trick to hide/steal spectacular amounts of money. Because of the interlinked nature of the markets, Nothing is safe from this, anything in an "account" of any sort (stock, bank, savings, checking, etc) is only as good as the per
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It will be unwound, messily, but it will unwind and society will go on. Do not buy into all of the hype about civilization coming to an end. There will always be people with excess capital that they want to invest. There will always be people with good ideas who need funding to get them off of the ground.
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All of our supply lines have had the slack engineered out of them in the name of "efficiency" in the last 20+ years. The US doesn't make everything it needs, let alone any given state... without international credit, next day air, and a continuous flow of liquid energy, it's all going to crash.
Eventually we'll recover... but the days of ever faster extraction of resources to be "consumed" then buried in a landfill, is rapidly approaching it's end. Unfortunately, we don't know how to work any other way.
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Typically, you write a testbench that can, in fact, printf() (sort of). Basically, you end up running a timing-level simulation of the FPGA, or sub-blocks thereof. You're really not developing a piece of software, you're developing a small ASIC. In any event, after you run timing simulations through your testbench where you put in known inputs and verify that you get the expected outputs, you're ready for anywhere from a few minutes to a few days (depending on the size of the FPGA) of compilation to get