BNP Paribas setzt auf NVIDIA-GPU-Lösung

In its efforts to promote Green computing, BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) announces the implementation of a new GPU-based architecture which simultaneously reduces electricity consumption and accelerates calculation times. A significant portion of the calculations, about one TeraFlop (one thousand billion calculations by second), performed for Global Equities and Commodity Derivatives (GECD) is transferred to a Graphical Processing Unit based platform. This allows a 100 fold increase in the amount of calculation achieved per Watt. This new platform, containing two NVIDIA Tesla S1070 consuming 2kW will replace more than 500 traditional CPU cores consuming 25 kW.

This initiative involved a re-architecture of the calibration software and its port. The benefits are massive:

• Overall reduction of electrical consumption by a factor of 190
• Overall reduction of response times by a factor of 15
• Improved legibility of market prices by traders.
• Significant reduction in total cost of operation
• Significant reduction in environmental impact

Within BNP Paribas, one of the missions of Global Equities & Commodity Derivatives (GECD) is to manage portfolios of complex financial instruments. The GECD quantitative research team simulates the behaviour of financial markets and is constantly striving to improve the performance of the software. With this goal in mind, the team decided to take advantage of NVIDIA Tesla solutions for the calibration of some of our models‘ parameters, a process which involves their estimation based on raw financial instrument prices using numerical optimization algorithms.