Credit crunch drives Wall Street to HPC


11 Jun 2008

The credit crisis in the global banking sector is driving Wall Street firms to increasingly conduct real-time and intra-day risk analysis using high-performance computing (HPC) resources, a Microsoft survey has found.

The survey, conducted by KRC Research, found that capital markets firms in the past 12 months have faced increased demands to run real-time market risk analysis (25pc), middle-office risk analytics (34pc) and portfolio-related calculations, such as rebalancing and hedging strategies (42pc).

Wall Street firms are turning to HPC to help carry out these activities. Companies reported ‘a lot or some’ demand for HPC to handle real-time market risk analysis (51pc), middle-office risk analytics (50pc) and portfolio-related calculations (54pc).

“Impacted by the credit crisis, capital markets firms are aligning their HPC resources toward uncovering and managing risk,” said Craig Saint-Amour, US capital markets industry solutions director at Microsoft. “In this tough economic environment, lowering operational costs and increasing overall productivity at all levels of a firm’s HPC value chain — from end users to developers to operations staff — is at the forefront of every manager’s mind.”

According to the survey, the most common lines of business using HPC environments today include equities (30pc), fixed income (20pc), commodities (13pc), foreign exchange (13pc), derivatives (23pc) and algorithmic trading (18pc).

By Niall Byrne