JP Morgan is now able to run risk analysis and price its global credit portfolio in near real-time after implementing application-led, High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities developed by Maxeler Technologies.
The investment bank worked with HPC solutions provider Maxeler Technologies to develop an application-led, HPC system based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology that would allow it to run complex banking algorithms on its credit book faster.
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“Being able to run the book in 12 seconds end-to-end and get a value on our multi-million dollar book within 12 seconds is a huge commercial advantage for us,” Stephen Weston, global head of the Applied Analytics group in the investment banking division of JP Morgan, said at a recent lecture to Stanford University students.
“If we can compress space, time and energy required to do these calculations then it has hard business values for us. It gives us ultimately a competitive edge, the ability to run our risk more frequently, and extracting more value from our books by understanding more fully is a real commercial advantage for us.”
The faster processing times means that JP Morgan can now respond to changes in its risk position more rapidly, rather than just looking back at the risk profile of the previous day, which was produced by overnight analyses.
The speed also allows the bank to identify potential problems and try to deal with them in advance. For example, JP Morgan can now run potential scenarios to assess its exposure to problems such as the Irish or Greek bank problems, which Weston said “wouldn’t have even been thinkable” before.
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The project took JP Morgan around three years, and the bank is now looking to push it into other areas of the business, such as high frequency trading.
