Friday, 9 April 2010

nTersect

nTersect

Aqumin Presents Financial Data in 3D

Posted: 09 Apr 2010 09:17 AM PDT

Periodically, we're using this blog to profile some of the companies that participated in NVIDIA's Emerging Companies Summit. You can learn more about innovative companies that use NVIDIA's GPU technology in the GPU Ventures Zone.

When it comes to making money in the financial markets, the ability to see opportunities is key. While there are many existing tools that extract data for users, the tools don't always present data in a meaningful way. Using CUDA parallel computing and GPUs, Houston-based startup Aqumin has developed a system that takes complex financial information and presents it intuitively, visually and in 3D. They find needles in a haystack and hand them over to users.

For financial information to be useful it needs to be shown in relation to other data. You don't know if a company's P/E ratio is good or bad unless you can compare it across a list of similar companies – its neighbors. Aqumin's AlphaVision technology literally presents a neighborhood, showing financial data as information in a cityscape.

By presenting individual securities as color-coded 3D buildings on city blocks, AlphaVision enables analysts and traders to interpret and interact with huge amounts of data in an environment that feels familiar and manageable. The size and color of a building and its neighbors can tell an analyst key information – such as market capitalization, price difference, etc. – at a glance. From there, an AlphaVision customer can easily drill down into more detail or interact with the cityscape to perform comparative analyses, complex financial operations and searches.

"Financial information has been 2D," Aqumin CTO Sean Spicer told NVIDIA VP of Business Development Jeff Herbst when the two met for a video chat at ECS. With Aqumin, "when people think about how to consume financial information, they'll be starting in a 3D landscape."

For financial analysts, who spend the bulk of their time either gathering or analyzing financial data, AlphaVision can significantly speed the development of their financial models. And while an individual trader without AlphaVision can manage roughly 50-60 securities at a given time, with AlphaVision, he or she can manage many more times that amount. (In his ECS presentation, Spicer showed a monitor screenshot from one multitasking trader who was managing 800 positions.)

Aqumin uses GPUs in two different ways. Behind the scenes, its algorithms have been accelerated with parallel computing using the CUDA architecture and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. On the customer side, Aqumin relies on NVIDIA Quadro and GeForce GPUs for graphics quality.

Although globally the financial sector has fallen on hard times, Aqumin is seeing opportunity in AlphaVision's elegant datascapes. They announced a deal with Bloomberg in September 2009 that enables Terminal users worldwide to run its software and recently announced a license agreement with the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

The World Is Parallel: GPU Computing Tames Satellite Image Processing

Posted: 08 Apr 2010 02:00 PM PDT

Web mapping services and programs such as Google Earth have made all of us users of satellite images that not very long ago were available mainly to government intelligence agencies. There is a great deal more to these images than meets the eye, and extracting that information turns out to be a major computational challenge. But like most problems involving graphical data, the processing of remote sensing data such as satellite imagery is ideally suited for parallel processing and can be accomplished at relatively low cost by doing much of the computation on graphics processing units.

Adobe Photoshop is an example of an image enhancement tool that many computer users are familiar with (and one that uses GPU processing when available to speed its often intense computations.) Photoshop, however, is primarily intended for photographers and other creative artists, while researchers generally need specialized, and often automated tools to extract the information they need.

Nvidiahq[1]
Satellite view of NVIDIA's Santa Clara, CA, campus in Google Earth

Intelligence work remains one of the important uses of image enhancement. The unmanned Predator unmanned aircrafts over Afghanistan and Iraq are flown by remote control from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and depend on real time processing of images from on board cameras, satellites, and other sources to identify and verify targets. The capabilities of the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office's Keyhole image intelligence satellites is classified, but it is generally believed that they are capable, with enhancement, of resolving features as small as a few centimeters (the U.S. government generally limits civilian satellite imagery to a resolution of one-half meter.)

Scientific research is also a huge user of image processing and climate change is an area of particular concern. Tracking the shrinking of polar ice caps and the extent of sea ice from space is relatively easy, but researchers are often interested in much more subtle alterations, such as the changes in species of trees and other plants that occurs with variation in temperature and rainfall. This requires much better resolution than spotting an iceberg. The mathematical techniques used to process these remote sensing images are computationally intensive and can benefit greatly from GPU computing techniques.

A number of image enhancement techniques can make the information hidden in satellite photos usable. The laws of physics limit how small an object can be resolved depending on the size of the lens or mirror and the distance to the target. But image processing can do better by bringing out features that the optics alone leave fuzzy. One way to improve on that is through edge detection, a mathematical technique that can be used to sharpen out-of-focus images by figuring out where sharp edges should be.

False color imaging is another technique that can be used to discover hidden data in images. Sometimes it is used to highlight features, such as differing types of vegetation, that would be hard to spot in a true color image, where all green plants, for example, look pretty much alike. A common use of false color is to capture data that would otherwise be invisible because it is captured outside the spectrum of visible light, usually in the infrared or ultraviolet.

Mort Canty is a physicist at the Jülich Research Center in southwestern Germany, where he does research in remote sensing and image processing, including geometric and radiometric corrections and map projections of satellite data. He has become a convert to GPU processing to get the maximum computational bang for the buck. (For the technically inclined, he mostly uses the IDL image processing language and ENVI software from ITT Visual Information Systems and it the author of Image Analysis, Classification, and Change Detection in Remote Sensing: With Algorithms for ENVI/IDL. He's also been experimenting with Tech-X's GPUlib as another way to run his computations on a NVIDIA GPU using CUDA.

Kkmeans[1]
ENVI used to process false color image of nonlinear clustering (Mort Canty)

"Recently I have been working with nonlinear image transformations, which are quite computationally intensive," he says. "GPULib is giving me a tenfold speedup on an old NVIDIA GeForce graphics card (which I hope to replace soon with a Fermi GPU)." He gives the main credit to CUDA's extremely fast execution of matrix operations: "For someone with limited time or programming abilities, a high-level package like GPULib can open a door to parallel processing which might otherwise have remained closed."

With satellite data now available either free (from Google and Microsoft) or in specialized forms at low cost, image enhancement software proliferating, and GPUs providing massive processing power, the use of image enhancement to extract information from remote sensing data is likely to explode.

This post is an entry in The World Isn't Flat, It's Parallel series running on nTersect, focused on the GPU's importance and the future of parallel processing. Today, GPUs can operate faster and more cost-efficiently than CPUs in a range of increasingly important sectors, such as medicine, national security, natural resources and emergency services. For more information on GPUs and their applications, keep your eyes on The World Isn't Flat, It's Parallel.

1337 Parenting Skillz, FTW

Posted: 08 Apr 2010 12:00 PM PDT

As a long time gamer, and a long time father, my worlds are colliding.

It first happened about 7 years ago playing "Sled Storm" on the original PlayStation. I was playing head-to-head with Coleman, my oldest son. I beat him, as I always did, for a few races. Then I left, but he stayed and played alone for while. About an hour later he asked me to play again. This time he won. He beat me badly. For several more races he beat me repeatedly. That was the first time I lost to him in a video game, and probably the last time I was able to beat him.

My parental and gaming worlds collided again this weekend. It happened when my youngest son Carson came running in to the den, screaming and crying - clearly devastated in the way that only 9 year olds can be devastated.

One of our more traditional life lesson moments.

"Daddy, Coleman called me a n00b," he sobbed.

Digging deeper, I discovered that his older brother had caught him and his friend 'boosting' in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. (COD4)

You see, in COD4 you get to level-up. With each level-up you get new stuff: weapons, attachments, emblems and titles for your character. To level up, you need to get achievements - challenges like getting a certain number of kills with each weapon, and even fun stuff like falling 30 feet or dropping an airdrop on another player.

Boosting is the act of artificially getting these accomplishments. Carson had set up a private match with someone on his friends list. They were the only two people on the map. They were taking turns killing each other to get certain achievements and level-up.

Upon getting the full run down, I held my baby's head in my hands, looked into his teary, blue eyes, and lovingly explained, "Honey, boosting is for n00bs. That's kind of like cheating. You're better than that."

I guess it was my way of passing along my traditions to my kids. As gamers get older, it is our obligation to teach our kids to respect the game and to pass along a strong set of digital morals. You should teach your kids traditional stuff like not talking during a golfer's backswing or not to celebrate a tackle when your team is down by 3 touchdowns. But as they show interest in video games, teach them the 'digital life lessons', too. Your kids should know not to block door ways in multi-player matches, that wall hackers suck, that aimbots will get you banned and boosting is for n00bs.

As they game, they will develop their own values for gaming—and like many other things in life sometimes their views may be in stark contrast to yours, so impress upon them what you can while you can. =For example, my oldest son says that camping is for n00bs. In contrast, I believe that sniping is skill and is perfectly acceptable. This is a highly debated topic. Since he pwns in COD4, I was forced to agree to disagree on this one.

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