Efficient Reconfigurable Architecture for Pricing Exotic Options
File(s)FinalPaper.pdf (9.2 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Fabry, Pieter
Thomas, DB
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
This article presents a new method for Monte Carlo (MC) option pricing using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which use a discrete-space random walk over a binomial lattice, rather than the continuous space-walks used by existing approaches. The underlying hypothesis is that the discrete-space walk will significantly reduce the area needed for each MC engine, and the resulting increase in parallelisation and raw performance outweighs any accuracy losses introduced by the discretisation. Experimental results support this hypothesis, showing that for a given MC simulation size, there is no significant loss in accuracy by using a discrete space model for the path-dependent exotic financial options. Analysis of the binomial simulation model shows that only limited-precision fixed-point arithmetic is needed, and also shows that pairs of MC kernels are able to share RAM resources. When using realistic constraints on pricing problems, it was found that the size of a discrete-space MC engine can be kept to 370 Flip-Flops and 233 Lookup Tables, allowing up to 3,000 variance-reduced MC cores in one FPGA. The combination of a highly parallelisable architecture and model-specific optimisations means that the binomial pricing technique allows for a 50× improvement in throughput compared to existing FPGA approaches, without any reduction in accuracy.
Date Issued
2017-12-27
Date Acceptance
2017-11-02
Citation
ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems, 2017, 10 (4)
ISSN
1936-7406
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Journal / Book Title
ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
Volume
10
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© 2017 ACM
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Computer Science
Exotic financial options
reconfigurable hardware
Monte Carlo optimizations
control variate
1006 Computer Hardware
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
29