Exploring reconfigurable architectures for explicit finite difference option pricing models

This paper explores the application of reconfigurable hardware and graphics processing units (GPUs) to the acceleration of financial computation using the finite difference (FD) method. A parallel pipelined architecture has been developed to support concurrent valuation of independent options with high pricing throughput. Our FPGA implementation running at 106 MHz on an xc4vlx160 device demonstrates a speed up of 12 times over a Pentium 4 processor at 3.6 GHz in single-precision arithmetic; while the FPGA is 3.6 times slower than a Tesla C1060 240-Core GPU at 1.3 GHz, it is 9 times more energy efficient.