Introduction

There has been a surge of interest over the past year in finding ways to decrease the power, cooling and space requirements of the data centre. Hardware accelerators are billed as one of the technologies that may be able to assist this. Typically hardware accelerators are far more power efficient than CPUs and due to the fact that they exploit multiple levels of parallelism, they offer vastly increased processing power.

Key findings

• Most viable hardware accelerators – It seems at present that the most viable hardware accelerations technologies are GPUs. However there seems to be a lot of interest in Larrabee from Intel and this may turn out to be the most successful on it’s release.
• Window of opportunity – Some have suggested that there will only be a limited window of opportunity for hardware acceleration technologies. However, only one of the interviewed banks firmly believes this.
• Lack of skill in the market place – In line with previous research in this area, this report found that there is a shortage of people in the financial services industry with knowledge of programming for hardware accelerators.
• The role of the quantitative analyst – The role of the quantitative analyst will very likely have to change going forward. Quants will have to become more aware of the infrastructure they are programming to.
• Investing in optimisations – At present banks are not very quantitative in their approach to optimisations. As the cost of new hardware is so cheap, it is very easy to put forward a business case to simply buy new hardware.
• Outsourcing – Only one of the interviewed banks is actively looking at outsourcing more of their IT. The most popular model seems to be a compute on demand type arrangement.

Conclusion

Ultimately the credit crisis has made it incredibly difficult to predict what may happen in this area. Hardware acceleration technology has been on the radar of the leading banks for a number of years now, but the inevitable cuts in IT spend have forced these projects to remain on the back burner.

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Tagged with: 2009, hardware accelerators, technology, Technology Research Report