Q&A
NYSE Tech Chief:
In Crisis, Hosted IT
Finds Ready
Audience
PAGE 16
VOLUME 21 NUMBER 8
APRIL 13, 2009
CLEARING p. 4 COMPLIANCE p. 8 OPERATIONS p. 12
Should CDS clearing be tied to exchanges? Scandals reshape regulatory agenda SunGard: IT no risk management cure-all
TECHNOLOGY p. 19
Can Microsoft cut firms’ operating costs?
Wall Street Ramps Up Computing PowerRISK RISK
MANAGEMENT
UBS Aims to Boost
Processing Without
Parallel Programming
BNP Speeds Risk Calculations
With Hardware Acceleration
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld
AS COMPUTING REQUIREments in the financial services
industry outpace Moore’s law,
more than doubling every
18 months, many firms have
turned to parallel programming to handle a growing
number of transactions and
increasingly complex calculations. UBS Investment Bank,
however, is eschewing a bot-tom-to-top rewriting of code
for its operations.
UBS needs to get “as fast as
we can,” acknowledged Scott
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By Chris Kentouris
BNP PARIBAS, MOVING TO
bolster its computational power, has implemented a new technology platform designed to
not only accelerate calculation
times for complex equity derivatives but also slash energy
consumption.
Last week, BNP Paribas
completed the transfer of risk
management calculations for
about 5 percent of its global
equity derivatives portfolio
from Intel Corp. central processing units (CPUs) to Nvidia technology that allows for
hardware acceleration based
on graphics processing units
(GPUs).
To speed up the implementation—conversion took
about six months—the French
investment bank opted to
limit the scope of the project.
“We were using about 10,000
cores of Intel processors on
Ada code and decided to move
5 percent of the CPU cores
to eight Nvidia GPUs on two
Tesla S1070 series computers,” explained Stephane Tyc,
global head of quantitative
research for equity and commodity derivatives.
The Nvidia GPUs are performing value-at-risk (VAR)
calculations using Monte
Carlo simulations, a complicated, though common, way to
determine a portfolio’s maximum loss over a certain period
of time. About 20,000 lines of
code are involved—or 2 percent of the total code used by
the equity derivatives unit.
Adding grids and servers
to achieve high-performance
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JP MORGAN PROFITS FROM RISK FOCUS
While many of its competitors have faltered, JP Morgan’s risk
management technologies and procedures have helped the bank
maintain a position of strength throughout the financial crisis.
SPECIAL REPORT ON PAGE 10
ONtheWEB
securitiesindustry.com
Allianz’s U.S. Funds Leverage Shared Technology
Data Center Spending
Reached $1.8 Billion in 2008
Technology Will Lead Industry
Into New Compliance Era,
Says Finra Exec
CLS and Icap Plan Joint
Venture for Forex Trade
Aggregation
By Chris Kentouris
SEEKING COST SAVINGS AND
operational efficiencies, Alli-
anz Global Investors is unify-
ing the technology
platforms of three of
its U.S. fund manag-
ers—Nicholas-Ap-
plegate Capital Management,
Oppenheimer Capital Man-
agement and NFJ Investment
Group.
“Every major system is
involved in one way or another,” said Nicholas-Applegate
(NACM) chief technology
officer Steve Rapp,
who in August was
also named CTO of
Oppenheimer Capital (OpCap) and NFJ. Rapp,
along with director of operations Christopher Cieri, plans
to finish moving the funds to
CASE
STUDY
NACM’s front-, middle- and
back-office systems by year-end 2010.
Allianz’s integration effort
is indicative of a consolidation
trend among Wall Street’s
largest financial institutions,
and CTOs like Rapp are striving to take a proactive approach to changes in IT infrastructure.
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