BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking has implemented a new technology platform it says will slash electricity consumption and accelerate calculation times for complex derivatives.
The bank says it is transferring a large chunk of the calculations - about one thousand billion a second - performed for its Global Equities and Commodity Derivatives (GECD) unit to the new Graphical Processing Unit-based platform, which contains two Nvidia Tesla S1070 systems, consuming 2kW.
The GECD quantitative research team, which simulates the behaviour of financial markets, is using the Nvidia Tesla technology for the calibration of some models parameters, which requires raw financial instrument prices using numerical optimisation algorithms.
The new platform replaces more than 500 traditional CPU cores consuming 25 kW, allowing a 100 fold increase in the amount of calculation achieved per Watt. The overall reduction of response times is a factor of 15, contributing to a reduction in total cost of operation.
BNP Paribas CIB says overall electricity consumption will be reduced by a factor of 190, significantly cutting the bank's environmental impact.
Stéphane Tyc, head, GECD quantitative research, BNP Paribas CIB, says: "We are extremely pleased with these performances, which significantly exceed our initial expectations. We hope to transfer more calculations to the GPU architecture in the near future."