high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

During times of stock market turbulence, monitoring the intraday clustering behaviour of financial instruments allows one to better understand market characteristics and systemic risks. While genetic algorithms provide a versatile methodology for identifying such clusters, serial implementations are computationally intensive and can take a long time to converge to the global optimum. We implement a Master-Slave parallel genetic algorithm (PGA) with a Marsili and Giada log-likelihood fitness function to identify clusters within stock correlation matrices. We utilise the Nvidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model to implement a PGA and visualise the results using minimal spanning trees (MSTs). We demonstrate that the CUDA PGA implementation runs significantly faster than the test case implementation of a comparable serial genetic algorithm. This, combined with fast online intraday correlation matrix estimation from high frequency data for cluster identification, may enhance near-real-time risk assessment for financial practitioners.