Techlaze, Richard Stallman To Launch His Own Fashion Line, here.

After making massive neckbeards a universal style statement, Richard Stallman, revered software freedom activist and computer programmer, has turned to the world of fashion. His new collection, titled RMS, is a luxury line of clothing specially designed for geeks and programmers. The launch follows on the success of GNU, a fragrance which he created and distributed for free. 

HPC Wire, Latest FPGAs Show Big Gains in Floating Point Performance, here. This isn’t totally crazy, the idea of pushing some floating point off to an FPGA, but there will need to be more adult supervision than is indicated by the article. Who is going to say no to more floating point instruction execution units?  It is good to see some Virtex-7 numbers.  The theoretical peak results are impressive but are perhaps better for finding applications that run well on FPGAs than finding FPGA configurations that run specific applications well.

I get the idea that FPGAs are going to offer greater flexibility in selecting the precision of the desired arithmetic – a good thing for optimizers, but again check the specific numerical behavior of your quant model, implementation, and application. I’m guessing Kahan and Higham have books full of optimized floating point precision stories filled with tragedy and the stains of end-user’s dried tears.  James Gosling is quoted in 1998 famously ” 95% of the folks out there are completely clueless about floating point.”  This of course highlights the value of programmers who at the very  least, know what they don’t know.

Tom’s Hardware,  Ivy Bridge CPU Torndown, Photographed, Tri-Gates Revealed, here. May 4 -18 release.

Tom’s Hardware, Does Your SSD’s File System Affect Performance? here. 380+ MBs writes.

IEEE Spectrum, The World According to DARPA. here. Dugen goes to google.

Wall Street and Technology, Prime Brokerages Consolidate After “Big Bang”, here.

In 2009, hedge funds with over $3 billion in assets had an average of 4.8 prime brokers, according to Tabb Group. Funds typically had just one broker before the crisis. But that disaggregation is reversing, falling to 3.9 in 2010 and to 2.9 brokers in 2011.

After the financial crisis, lower-tier players such as Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc tried – and succeeded – to take market share from the traditional duopoly of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, while a number of smaller primes ramped up their operations.

That jockeying for position came ahead of an expected renaissance that has so far had mixed blessings for the industry.

Hedge fund assets, which peaked at $2.2 trillion in 2007, rebounded dramatically after the financial crisis. They fell to $1.4 trillion in 2008, but are now around $2 trillion.

But successive crises and volatile, correlated markets have sapped investor confidence, hitting trading, which in turn is hurting prime brokerages. Average daily U.S. trading volume so far in 2012 is 6.83 billion shares, down from 7.84 billion in 2011.

HFT Throwdown: Bloomberg, High-Speed Trading Is Progress, Not Piracy, here and Ritholtz/Saluzzi, HFT Pirates And Their Academic Friends, here. SEC Concept Release, here.

SUMMARY: The Securities and Exchange Commission (“Commission”) is conducting a broad review of the current equity market structure. The review includes an evaluation of equity market structure performance in recent years and an assessment of whether market structure rules have kept pace with, among other things, changes in trading technology and practices. To help further its review, the Commission is publishing this concept release to invite public comment on a wide range of market structure issues, including high frequency trading, order routing, market data linkages, and undisplayed, or “dark,” liquidity. The Commission intends to use the public’s comments to help determine whether regulatory initiatives to improve the current equity market structure are needed and, if so, the specific nature of such initiatives.