So, a major broker-dealer gets a 2011 industry award for running their overnight Risk and P&L credit derivative batch though a 1000 node CPU grid and some FPGAs in 238 seconds (in 2008 the same computation and same broker-dealer but presumably different CDS inventory took 8 hours, a great success). Then some blog posting claims that this same credit derivative batch could be run with some optimized C++ code on a $2500 Mac Pro in under 2 seconds IEEE 754 double precision tied out to the precision of the inputs. What’s going on? Does the credit derivative batch require a $1,000,000 CPU grid, FPGAs, and 238 seconds or one $2,500 MacPro, some optimized code, and 2 seconds?

It’s the MacPro + 2 seconds very likely, let’s think how this could be wrong:

A. The disclosed data is materially wrong or we have misinterpreted it egregiously. The unusual event in all this is the public disclosure of the broker-dealer’s runtime experience and the code they were running. It is exceedingly rare to see such a public disclosure.  That said, the 8 hour production credit derivative batch at a broker-dealer in 2008 is not the least-bit surprising.  The disclosure itself tells you the production code was once bloated enough to be optimized from 8 hours to 4 minutes. You think they nailed the code optimization on an absolute basis when the 4 minutes result was enough to  get a 2011 industry award, really? The part about the production infrastructure being a supercomputer with thousands of grid CPUs and FPGAs, while consistent with other production processes we have seen and heard of running on the Street, is the part you really have to hope is not true.

B. The several hundred thousand position credit derivative batch could be Synthetic CDO tranches and standard tranches and require slightly more complicated computation than the batch of default swaps assumed in the previous analysis.  But all the correlation traders (folks that trade CDOs and tranches) we know in 2011 were back to trading vanilla credit derivatives and bonds. The credit derivative batch with active risk flowing through in 2011 is the default swap batch (you can include index protection like CDX and ITRX in this batch as well). Who is going to spend three years improving the overnight process on a correlation credit derivative book that is managed part time by a junior trader with instructions to take on zero risk? No one.

C. The ISDA code just analyzed is not likely to be the same as the 2011 award winning production credit derivative batch code. In fact, we know portions of the production credit derivative batch were translated into FPGA circuitry, so the code is real different, right? Well over the last decade of CDS trading most of the broker-dealers evolved to the same quantitative methodology for valuing default swaps. Standards for converting upfront fees to spreads (ISDA) and unwind fees (Bloomberg’s CDSW screen) have influenced broker-dealer CDS valuation methodology. We do not personally know exactly what quantitative analytics each one of the of the broker-dealers runs in 2011, but Jarrow-Turnbull default arrival and Brent’s method for credit curve cooking covers a non-trivial subset of the broker-dealers. The ISDA code is not likely to be vastly different from the production code the other broker-dealers use in terms of quantitative method. Of course, in any shop there could be some undisclosed quantitative tweaks included in production and the MacPro + 2 seconds analysis case would be exposed in that event.

D. The computational performance analysis just presented could be flawed. We have only thought about this since seeing the Computerworld UK article and spent a couple weekends working out the estimate details. We could have made a mistake or missed something. But even if we are off by a factor of 100 in our estimates (we are not) its still $2500 + MacPro + 200 seconds versus $1,000,000 + 1000 CPU+ FPGAs+238 seconds.

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