<story><title>The $10 Hedge Fund Supercomputer That’s Sweeping Wall Street</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-20/the-10-hedge-fund-supercomputer-that-s-sweeping-wall-street</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wjnc</author><text>The gap that firms are trying to bridge is _huge_. I work in finance (slow finance: insurance), but finance technical enough to have our own PhD-level quants building code. They are running simulations taking hours, so scaling up on # cores would seem the first step to take. But it&amp;#x27;s not that the quants don&amp;#x27;t know parallelization, it&amp;#x27;s the IT-architecture not allowing to use AWS at all. And well, many cores on your own premises is hugely expensive because they are idle most of the time. And as a sidestep, most quants are not the first you think of to woo architectures&amp;#x27; support. (This is probably easier for firms that trade for own profit.)&lt;p&gt;Point being: improvements in AI &amp;#x2F; machine learning and other statistical techniques are huge, and analytical demand exists, but &amp;#x27;old corporations&amp;#x27; need cultural change before they can start working with and embedding startup-like technology in their workflows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mseebach</author><text>IT shops are inherently conservative, that&amp;#x27;s their job.&lt;p&gt;The trick is to get the higher-ups interested - they have the power to redirect IT, and are inherently (if laggingly) interested in making employees as effective as possible.&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, a fluff-piece in Bloomberg is a pretty good way of achieving it. Tomorrow, some manager will pop into a quant&amp;#x27;s office with this article in his hand and ask &amp;quot;Are you doing this? Why not?&amp;quot; and that&amp;#x27;s how the ball gets rolling on opening up.&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time, getting remote access to email was a &amp;quot;this will never happen&amp;quot;, then an executive saw someone with a BlackBerry at the golf club. Once upon a time, getting email access on anything other than a BlackBerry was a &amp;quot;this will never happen&amp;quot;, then an executive saw someone with an iPhone.</text></comment>
<story><title>The $10 Hedge Fund Supercomputer That’s Sweeping Wall Street</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-20/the-10-hedge-fund-supercomputer-that-s-sweeping-wall-street</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wjnc</author><text>The gap that firms are trying to bridge is _huge_. I work in finance (slow finance: insurance), but finance technical enough to have our own PhD-level quants building code. They are running simulations taking hours, so scaling up on # cores would seem the first step to take. But it&amp;#x27;s not that the quants don&amp;#x27;t know parallelization, it&amp;#x27;s the IT-architecture not allowing to use AWS at all. And well, many cores on your own premises is hugely expensive because they are idle most of the time. And as a sidestep, most quants are not the first you think of to woo architectures&amp;#x27; support. (This is probably easier for firms that trade for own profit.)&lt;p&gt;Point being: improvements in AI &amp;#x2F; machine learning and other statistical techniques are huge, and analytical demand exists, but &amp;#x27;old corporations&amp;#x27; need cultural change before they can start working with and embedding startup-like technology in their workflows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcguire</author><text>This is pretty common outside finance as well. &amp;quot;We can&amp;#x27;t let our data touch any one else&amp;#x27;s network!&amp;quot; And, of course, we can&amp;#x27;t bother to get our IT group on the smarts wagon, so we&amp;#x27;re massively inefficient all the way around.</text></comment>