Zircon Computing and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) Announce Case Study Results with Goethe University Frankfort

Significant Performance Gain is Easily Achieved, Sequential Heston Calibration Computation Reduced from 9 hours to 18 minutes

(I-Newswire) June 4, 2010 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
Ron Guida
Zircon Computing, LLC
856-596-7444
Ron.Guida@Zircomp.com
http://www.zircomp.com

Zircon Computing and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) Announce Case Study Results with Goethe University Frankfort

Significant Performance Gain is Easily Achieved, Sequential Heston Calibration Computation Reduced from 9 hours to 18 minutes

Wayne, New Jersey – June 8, 2010 -- Zircon Computing and NAG today announced the results of work performed by Goethe University Frankfurt. The case study details the results of parallelizing NAG with Zircon Software for computational finance applications.

“The NAG numerical Library is used at Goethe University Frankfurt to provide fast and reliable mathematical and statistical algorithms” says Dr. Grigory Vilkov, Assistant Professor of Finance at Goethe University Frankfurt. “We are constantly increasing the level of complexity and, more importantly, the quantity of models and data that we process”, added Dr. Vilkov. ”In order to stay successful in research and to cope with these volumes, we needed to move to parallel and distributed systems”.

“We began to use the Zircon software to address our parallelization and distributed computing requirements. And we found that the NAG C library integrated very easily with the Zircon Software, said Dr. Vilkov. Furthermore, the Zircon software was easy to learn and use, and was extremely scalable. We maximized our hardware utilization and realized near linear performance gains”, added Dr. Vilkov. “We were able to reduce the compute time of the Heston calibration application from 9 hours to 18 minutes to process 1,065 models” said Dr. Vilkov.

“While there are number of approaches to increasing performance and scale to existing or new compute-intensive applications some can be programmatically cumbersome and thus out of reach for many organizations,” says David Cassell, Product Marketing Manager. “NAG sees that Zircon provides an immediate way for people to benefit from this exciting new technology. We know that there is tremendous market potential.”
About Zircon Computing
Zircon Computing, LLC, is an international software and services company based in Wayne, New Jersey. Founded in 2005 by senior technologists from the financial services industry, Zircon Computing develops and markets the Zircon Software Product Suite of adaptive middleware and high performance software and services worldwide, both directly to enterprise clients and through an international network of partners. Zircon Computing is privately held. For more information, please visit http://www.zircomp.com

About NAG
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is a long established not-for-profit numerical software development organization that collaborates with world-leading researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. With offices in Oxford, Manchester, Chicago, Tokyo and Taipei, and a worldwide distributor network, NAG provides high-quality computational software and high performance computing services to tens of thousands of users, from Global 500 companies, major learning academies, the world’s leading supercomputing centers, numerous independent software vendors and many others.
www.nag.co.uk; www.nag.com

About Goethe University
Goethe University Frankfurt is one of the major institutions of higher education in Germany, committed to providing a wide spectrum of disciplines in research and teaching, to generating outstanding achievements, and to breaking new ground through the targeted utilization of the advantages and synergies of interdisciplinary work in research and teaching. The University has more than 15 academic departments with about 37,000 students and more than 2,500 researchers. The newest part of the University, hosting the researchers involved in the current study - the House of Finance - opened in spring 2008, and it incorporates the university’s interdisciplinary research on finance, monetary economics, and corporate and financial law under one umbrella.

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