
The $10 Hedge Fund Supercomputer That’s Sweeping Wall Street - gk1
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-20/the-10-hedge-fund-supercomputer-that-s-sweeping-wall-street
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wjnc
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's not that the quants
don't know parallelization, it'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' support. (This is probably easier for
firms that trade for own profit.)

Point being: improvements in AI / machine learning and other statistical
techniques are huge, and analytical demand exists, but 'old corporations' need
cultural change before they can start working with and embedding startup-like
technology in their workflows.

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mcguire
This is pretty common outside finance as well. "We can't let our data touch
any one else's network!" And, of course, we can't bother to get our IT group
on the smarts wagon, so we're massively inefficient all the way around.

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Someone1234
I'm playing devil's advocate a little: There are sometimes legitimate legal
hurdles to having your data hit external networks. For example, if you're a
medical insurance company, then you have to get everything HIPAA legal.

~~~
sologoub
Looks like AWS is HIPAA complaint at least for some services:

"Customers may use any AWS service in an account designated as a HIPAA
account, but they should only process, store and transmit PHI in the HIPAA-
eligible services defined in the BAA. There are six HIPAA-eligible services
today, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon
Glacier, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancer."

[http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-
compliance/](http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/)

Notably, I don't see Elastic MapReduce. It seems that if you wanted to run
heavy data crunching, you'd have to run you own cluster on EC2.

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DominoDataLab
Hi guys, I'm a founder at Domino Data Lab (one of the other companies
mentioned in the article). I'm happy to answer questions anyone has. I can
also corroborate the opinions in the thread here: many of our customers are in
finance and insurance, and many of them don't want data leaving their networks
at all (hence the need for an on-prem offering).

~~~
walterbell
Is the on-prem offering a combination of "OSS private cloud" and a proprietary
analytics / machine learning API?

~~~
DominoDataLab
We don't offer a proprietary ML library or API -- we run arbitrary user code,
whatever languages and packages you want to use (Python, R, h2o, dato,
compiled C++, etc.). The infrastructure piece is like a private cloud, yes.

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bd_at_rivenhill
I've met some of the guys from Ufora and seen a demo of their technology; very
impressive. I've always been leery of the claim that you can create smart
software to make the problems of writing parallel code magically disappear,
but what they've done has made me rethink some beliefs related to working with
big data at scale. Definitely a company to keep an eye on.

~~~
sbenario
Glad to hear you like it! We think it's pretty cool ourselves :-)

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gourneau
Sensai which is mentioned in the article is hiring Java AI/NLP folks in Palo
Alto
[http://sensai.workable.com/jobs/19235](http://sensai.workable.com/jobs/19235)
The CTO Monica Anderson also runs the bay area AI meetup group

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sbenario
PM @ Ufora here. Happy to answer any questions you might have!

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bra-ket
Ufora DSL:
[http://kb.ufora.com/index/language/documentation.html](http://kb.ufora.com/index/language/documentation.html)

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PublicEnemy111
Is it common to use prop trading strategies for trading a personal portfolio?
Or do quants almost exclusively work at hedge funds

~~~
tdees40
I've never met a quant trader trading for their own account. It requires some
infrastructure that would be hard to justify unless you have lots of money to
invest, and you're really good at it.

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Bostonian
It is common for successful quant traders to be partners (have equity) in
their firms, which means they are "trading for their own account" to some
extent.

~~~
dopamean
I think what he meant by "for their own account" was something smaller and
personal. Not part of a larger pool containing hundreds of millions of
dollars.

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carsongross
LTCM wasn't a warning, it was prophesy.

~~~
adultSwim
A prophesy which became manifest a few years back.

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jchrisa
2006 called, they want their technology back.

