Stock Market
Simulator
The way we can be
millionaires through CS267!!!
CS267 Assignment 0
Sukun Kim
1. Introduction
What if we can predict the future, or even
tomorrow of stock market? Yes, we are MILLIONAIRES! Even if this kind of dream may
not be realistic, we know that tools helping market prediction will interest
dealers at Wall Street, giving us another chance to become millionaires. Here
are applications which prophesy of future of market. I found two interesting
applications concerning market simulation. A research group at Los Alamos
National Laboratory does economic analysis in diverse areas. And CDAC, an
Indian company developed a stock market simulator in a product level. I
introduce them here.
2.
(1)
Application
A research group in LANL does researches in
two categories, Macroeconomics and Microeconomics. Macroeconomics covers
International Economics and Regional Economics. Microeconomics includes Energy
Economics, Finance, Industry Analysis, and Market Analysis. They are doing
extensive economic model simulation. There are many links to research
materials. However, unfortunately accesses to them are not permitted. It was
impossible to find information about algorithms or performance of application.
You can get more information about the research group from the link below.
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/d/d4/econo/economics.html
(2)
Platform
They use the 6th powerful
supercomputer in the world (http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/).
It is a cluster of Compaq AlphaServer ES45 Systems (http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/es45/).
Its peak performance is 4096GFlops/s, and LINPACK performance is 2916GFlops/s.
Since no information about application could be accessed as stated above, the
ratio of performance of application compared to peak performance is unknown.
3. Strategy Development 2000
Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (CDAC) already developed a stock market simulator and sells it. Named
as Strategy Development 2000 (SD2000), the simulator uses artificial
intelligence techniques such as neural network, genetic algorithm, fuzzy logic
based on massive data base to forecast trader behavior. Unfortunately, as you
may guess, the algorithm of the application or research material can not be
accessed. Information about SD2000 can be found from the link below.
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/finance/sd2000.asp
(2)
Platform
SD2000 uses PARAM 10000. It used up to 4 UltraSPARC-II processors. The PARAM systems can be extended
to a cluster supercomputer. A clustered system with 1200 processors can deliver
a peak performance of up to 1TFlops/s. Even though PARAM 10000 system is not ranked within top 500 supercomputers, it has a
possibility of gaining a high rank. It uses a variation of MPI developed in
CDAC. No performance data is available, although one would presume that it will
not be very different from that of other UltraSPARC-II
based systems using MPI. Because SD2000 is a commercial product, it is
impossible to gather detailed data about algorithm and performance of the
product.
More
detailed specification of PARAM 10000 can be found at http://www.cdacindia.com/html/param.asp
www.top500.org also introduces PARAM 10000 at
http://www.top500.org/ORSC/2002/cdac.html#cdac
4. Remaining Challenges/Difficulties
Since economy itself is influenced by every
single factor of the world, economic simulation also requires a large amount of
data. Moreover, effect of the factors are so entangled and complicated that
many techniques from artificial intelligence are needed to imitate them. So
these applications not only rely on supercomputer and efficient parallel
algorithm, but also rely on huge data base, data mining, and artificial
intelligence. This property is a challenging but also exciting point of these
applications.
5. Evaluation/Conclusion
Researches in this area are not open to
public. Information about applications is also hidden. So I could not get much
help concerning parallel computing and algorithm. But, this gives a possibility
of commercial use of parallel computing. Market simulation system has unlimited
applications. Stock market simulation attracts dealers in Wall Street, crop
market simulation will give very useful information for producers to control
production amount so that they can prevent a price crash. Economic simulation
can be applied to any kind of market, even though it would be quite
challenging. This is an excitement and a chance for us.