Interactive Supercomputing's Star-P software is helping Julius
Finance bring new computational techniques to one of the most
challenging analytical problems in institutional finance: credit
modeling.
Julius Finance is a private research company that is using high
performance computers (HPCs) to analyze credit derivative products. With
Star-P, the firm's researchers are able to rapidly develop new
algorithms to create realistic credit models from which banks, hedge
funds and other financial institutions can make more accurate
predictions about a portfolio's potential.
"Existing mathematical frameworks for CDO (collateralized debt
obligation) valuation are far from compelling -- to put it mildly,"
said Peter Cotton, CEO of Julius Finance. "This is not surprising,
as rigorous evaluation of credit models is prohibitively time consuming
in any conventional research setup. We've turned to Star-P to
reduce prototyping time and facilitate memory intensive experiments --
looking under more rocks, as it were, and finding very interesting
things."
Star-P is an ideal solution for this challenge because it enables
researchers to easily code algorithms and models on their desktops using
popular high-level languages like MATLAB(R), Python and R, automatically
transforming the programs to run on parallel HPCs. Star-P eliminates the
need to re-program the applications in complex languages such as C,
FORTRAN or MPI (message passing interface) to run on Julius
Finance's Linux based cluster -- which otherwise requires arcane
programming knowledge and months to complete.
"The computationally challenging analysis of credit factors
such as spread, credit rating, foreign exchange and interest rates for a
wide variety of corporate investments have made the credit derivative
market a black art at best," said Ilya Mirman, vice president of
marketing at Interactive Supercomputing. "Julius Finance is
bringing new ideas and technology to these central problems in
institutional finance."
About Julius Finance
Julius Finance is a private research company addressing difficult
outstanding problems in mathematical finance. In particular, the company
provides unique perspective on the relative valuation of synthetic
collateralized debt obligations which until now have been priced with
largely unconvincing or internally inconsistent Copula models. Julius
Finance also supports academic efforts and public domain software,
sponsoring an experiment in collaboration at
http://www.financialmathematics.com.
For more information, visit http://www.juliusfinance.com.
About Interactive Supercomputing
Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) launched in 2004 to commercialize
Star-P, an interactive parallel computing platform. With automatic
parallelization and interactive execution of existing desktop technical
applications, Star-P merges two previously distinct environments --
desktop computers and high performance servers -- into one. Based in
Waltham, Mass., the privately held company markets Star-P for a range of
biomedical, financial, and government laboratory research applications.
For more information, call 781/419-5088 or visit
http://www.interactivesupercomputing.com.
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