7. They’re earning millions
Financial markets are a fickle lot. Market scenarios are constantly changing as new economic information gets released and all the market players react, often haphazardly. Although certain market movements might be predicted based on experience or intuition, not all situations can be manually sampled for risk and potential outcome.
A supercomputer capable of simulating the thousands of market transactions that might occur in response to new information would therefore be an extremely valuable tool for financial institutions. Indeed, J.P. Morgan has already enlisted the help of a Maxeler dataflow supercomputer in its fixed income trading operations. The 128 teraFLOPS processor allows complex trading analysis to be computed within minutes as compared to hours when performed by a human employee.
