(this is the title of a technology roundup in Wilmott Magazine, May 2011)
Each half year we make a roundup on how the drivers in the technology space will influence our future as makers and re-marketers of math-based software.
The need for speed, issues of model and method validation, data and computation management and the challenges of global accessibility have not changed. Challenges and opportunities of ease of programming and automation are not novel to us..
Summarizing it is the challenge of building adaptive frameworks that switch regimes, if requirements change. We do it ourselves and provide the foundations and know-how packages how to do it to our customers.
Modeling, model calibration and solving need to be adequate, accurate and robust. The ability to make them blazingly fast does not only save time but give us better ways to validate and switch models and work with adaptive precision. GPUs help us to achieve this and it seems NVIDIA Tesla architectures still drive the technology.
But the race for speed it also driven by coarse grain parallelism with grid and cloud computing - MS strives for simplifying parallelization up to the cloud hybrid with GPU support.
It is my strong believe that hybrid CPU-GPU desktops and servers will drive the business.
Combining analytics and data management still needs linking HPC computing and transaction processing in the SQL world
Domain specific programming, task and application building. This is THE new challenge.
All our packages are solutions and development systems in one. We provide domain specific languages and will make them available from standard programming languages.
Users manipulate our engines from certain user interfaces and/or programmatically.
Deployment. Although a transition into app-type front-ends is possible, we think of web deployment at the moment..
And still Mathematica is the only platform that has all ingredients we need. Mathematica 8 has not only convinced us with its great new capabilities in statistics and probability but also its software engineering tools enabling us to unleashing our innovations in environments users are experienced.
Consequently, accelerating our engines in C/C++ we will intensify the partnership with NVIDIA.
Grid and web computing, SQL links, domain specific languages, application building and link technologies will be atop the Mathematica 8 + platform. It is amazing, our stable partnership with Wolfram is in the 21st year now.
Our core competences: quant finance, econophysics, data mining and machine learning in solutions and symbolic computation, numerics, hybrid programming and HPC computing in techniques.
