Milliseconds make all the difference in the finance industry and that is why GPU-accelerated solutions have become commonplace in many applications such as, Big Data, machine learning and neural networks, as faster analytics offer a huge competitive advantage in HPC and also Finance industries. The finance, banking and investment sector, is lately turning to GPU accelerated solutions for real-time analytics demands including fraud analysis, risk management and algorithmic trading. One of the more popular methods of analysis is the Monte Carlo Simulations method, used in both Finance and HPC industries.

There are many applications of Monte Carlo simulation in the finance industry. Methods are used to simulate various sources of uncertainty that affect the value of a financial instrument, such as a portfolio or an investment, and then to calculate a representative value given these possible underlying inputs. The main idea behind it is quite simple: simulate the stochastic components in a formula and then average the results, leading to the expected value. Of course, the more simulations you make, the more accurate the result will be.

 

BIOS IT partners with vScaler to provide finance specific applications in the cloud

As the Monte Carlo method is basically a way to compute expected values by generating random scenarios and then averaging them, it is actually very efficient to parallelise. Traditional methods of applying Monte Carlo simulations in finance and HPC settings relied on a standard CPU based platform and could take hours or days to complete. More recently, these industries are looking to GPU to speed up this simulation process with results showing staggering performance increases, with massive savings in both computational power and time.

BIOS IT has a broad range of GPU solutions for such simulations, such as the BIOS ANNA (artificial neural network accelerator) – a 1U GPU server created by BIOS IT, Supermicro® and NVIDIA® - purpose built for accelerated analytics, featuring four NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. As well as solid on-premise appliances such as the ANNA, BIOS IT can also offer its customers a cloud based approach. Cloud-based Monte Carlo simulations offer a fast, affordable and easily accessible alternative to on-premise GPU solutions. Thanks to its partnership with cloud infrastructure provider vScaler, BIOS IT can provide customers with finance and HPC specific application stacks in the cloud. The platform, which has a GPU element already integrated - takes all the administrative burden out of configuring a complex analytical clusters and software eco-systems. Customers can select from their preferred distribution (Hadoop, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR) and begin running data-intensive applications such as Monte Carlo simulations, quantitative risk modelling and portfolio valuation in a matter of minutes.

Contact your BIOS IT sales representative today to discuss your GPU requirements.