Computing at the speed of trading (keynote)

When the word trading comes up in conversation, most people think first of the stock markets and frantic traders of movie and television. In reality many of the largest deals are done over-the-counter and so expose the parties to the contract to each other’s financial circumstances. This raises the question: what is my potential future exposure (PFE) if “the other guy” – the counterparty – defaults? Sophisticated measures like PFE and the related CVA allow firms to monitor their exposure to others, to limit it, and to ensure their capital will support the deals it makes. This analysis involves forecasting deal values far into the future, examining legal agreements between the two firms, and evaluating the deal itself. Algorithms in this domain use thousands of scenarios as well as complex aggregation and pricing techniques, all across hundreds of future time points to produce actionable risk metrics. In this talk I’ll discuss some of the complexities of the problem, how it can be broken down into efficient computational chunks and delve into our recent experiments with parallelizing the aggregation across scenarios and time points using OpenMP to enhance real-time performance.