IBM Lab Working on Streaming Stock Analysis

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ibmTechRadar has an article featuring ten “interesting and unexpected” laboratory projects IBM seems to be working on.  Many of these projects fall in the unexpected category simply because the vast majority of technology consumers are outside of the realm of scientific computing.  Oddly enough, the first project on their list involves doing real-time stock analysis using streaming data techniques and a rather hefty IBM BlueGene.  IBM is working with TD Bank in Toronto to analyse financial data as it comes across the wire with very sophisticated algorithms.  Its one thiing to perform options pricing based on current market conditions.  Real time analysis [eg, heavily time sensitive… seconds, not minutes or hours] of data can become horribly difficult.

We are researching the ability to process data from a huge number of sources, so this project is using stream computing and the Blue Gene supercomputer,” says Morris. “We are able to get a 21x speed-up than any other system. The messages and sensors in the financial systems are increasing at more than 50 per cent each year – faster than doubling every two years – so something new is needed to analyse this data.”

“The goal of any automated trading system is to reduce the time between the receipt of market data messages and the decision, achieving a very low latency while processing extreme amounts of data,” adds Nagui Halim, chief scientist of the Stream Computing Project at IBM.

This is horribly interesting stuff.  There are nine other projects listed in the article.  They range from Hudson River data, electric cars and cocoa [yup, chocolate].  Read the full article here.

Comments

  1. Toon Knapen says

    This is already about the 3rd time this streaming project with TD bank gets airtime on insidehpc. However, there is no information at all in the article. I would love to see that they specify how many products they are analysing continuously, which analysis they perform etc. I’m dying to have more info on hpc in finance at insidehpc but this article, in my view, has no value at all.

    Sorry John, nevertheless I’m still a fan.

    toon