BlackRock: 4 Calculations Per Minute!

I stumbled upon this story last night and it amused me to no end, but from a purely geeky standpoint.

Tom Adams: Department of “Huh?” – BlackRock’s Larry Fink as Hero?

It pointed me to a Vanity Fair article and a quote within.

Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow

But while its size was impressive, what would distinguish BlackRock was its state- of-the-art system for evaluating and managing risk. With 5,000 computers running 24 hours a day, overseen by a team of engineers, mathematicians, analysts, and programmers, BlackRock’s “computer farm” could monitor millions of daily trades and scrutinize every single security in its clients’ investment portfolios to see how they would be affected by even the most minor changes in the economy. Churning through 200 million calculations each week, its computers could simulate every imaginable shift in interest rates, every conceivable change in the financial markets, and stress-test the performance of hundreds of thousands of securities in numerous global-crisis scenarios.

Here are the facts we are told.

5,000 computers running 24 hours a day!
200 million calculations per week!

It sounds extremely impressive, but let's do the math.

200,000,000,000 / 5,000 / 7 / 24 / 60 = 4

That's 4 calculations per computer per minute.

I think Blackrock needs to upgrade their computers to something a bit faster.

Might I suggest something from the period 2700–2300 BC.

Let me try to do this justice. I'm running with a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024. There's 1.3 million individual pixels of color on my screen. In order change the screen's image, every single one of those pixel's colors must be set individually. If it took just one calculation per pixel then it would take one of Blackrock's computers 227 days to update my screen.

Raw computing horsepower, baby. That's what I'm talking about, lol.

Clearly Blackrock's computers are faster than that. I'm heckling the idea that 200 million calculations per week is an even remotely useful statistic to us though. It's like saying that the knob goes to 4. Nothing more.



US Air Force Orders 2,200 PS3’s For Clustered Supercomputer

Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

What's 150 GFLOPS you might ask? It's 150 billion floating point operations per second. That's what my single Playstation 3 sitting in my family room can do. My PS3 can do roughly 750 times more calculations than 5,000 BlackRock computers working in concert, or so I am told. It doesn't take a week either. It only takes one second. Hahaha!

Vanity Fair's 200 million calculations per week claim is the funniest statistic I have seen in a long, long time.