Need for speed: banks explore FPGAs for portfolio modelling

It can take hours for traditional bank systems to run portfolio risk models. That’s too slow for some banks, which are now exploring unwieldy – but quick – field-programmable gate arrays. By Clive Davidson

As the eurozone's political soap opera plays out, the probabilities attached to various different scenarios seem to rise or fall from one day to the next. At times, the likeliest outcome appears to be years of austerity and weak growth, punctuated by occasional panics; at others, it’s easier to envisage political will failing, followed by a string of sovereign defaults. Given the uncertainty, the critical question has become the size of a bank’s exposure to various scenarios, rather than the