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Thread: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

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    Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Hey guys, this is my first post here. I am not totally computer illiterate, but the last time I built my own tower was when a 500Mhz processor was top of the line and you were a god if you could code an HTML webpage by hand. I've been doing a lot of reading and trying to catch up on the new technologies, but I thought it would be more efficient to pick the brains of some more experienced people.

    I'm in University and I need a Laptop to run computer simulations involving a lot of data and complex algorithms. An example would be taking 4000 different stocks and the previous 5 years of daily price data and calculating which pairs of stocks have maximum likelihood to have their difference return to a mean given a specified time period. I will also be running a lot of monte carlo simulations (creating thousands of versions of possible scenarios for given constraints across hundreds or thousands of observations).

    The programs I will be using for this are Excel and MATLAB. Currently I have an i3 370M and 4 gigs of ddr3. My computer simply cannot handle what I am doing.

    I don't play games, but if I had a video card I'm sure I would. And by this I mean I would be happy at playing BF3 at minimum graphic settings.

    Now, because I have been out of the loop for so long I no longer know where I should be focusing my efforts and my dollars. So I would like this to be a learning experience as much as I can. Example, I don't know whether 16gigs of ram would be more useful for this as opposed to 8gigs of ram and instead upgrading to an SSD harddrive; or whether the processing power would be the biggest factor in this build, etc.

    Budget: $1050
    Must: 15.6" Laptop (non Glossy screen if possible)
    Optional: Video Card

    If you are recommending a certain part or pre-built computer it would be greatly helpful if you could tell me why. I can learn this stuff pretty fast but with so many different things out there now I don't really know where to pick up where I left off.

    Thanks Guys. Look forward to sticking around the forum it is good stuff!
    Last edited by murphmack; 15-07-2012 at 07:02 PM.

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Well, from my research it would appear that this sort of calculation is most efficiently handled by some sort of GPU-computing. Either CUDA or GCN. In which case we would be looking at having a discrete GPU, and preferably of the most recent generation.

    http://www.mas.ncl.ac.uk/~ncsg3/research/sebposter.pdf

    Does it have to be a laptop ? That form factor will substantially decrease your computing-per-buck compared to even a mATX box.
    Society's to blame,
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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Welcome to Hexus, its great to have some serious computational conundrums

    Going by the research Phage has done, if you decided it really does have to have some form of portability then i would say the MSI gaming laptops would probably be a good way to go, they generally do pretty well in reviews!

    I totally agree with Phage's comment though, going for a small form factor PC build would reap much better results/performance for the money you are paying. I would suggest that if you really do need to be able to access the PC and tell it to make calculations while you are out and about, VNC or some other form of remote desktop from a much more basic and lightweight laptop might be more appropriate?

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Quote Originally Posted by Phage View Post
    Well, from my research it would appear that this sort of calculation is most efficiently handled by some sort of GPU-computing.
    With appropriate software that's probably true, but I don't think either Excel or MATLAB can utilise GPGPU.

    The key thing is whether either of those programs is heavily threaded, and here the OP can check - just fire up one of your existing calculations on the current machine, stat Task Manager, in the "processes" tab find excel.exe or whatever the matlab exe is called (matlab.exe perhaps? ) and look for the "threads" column (you may need to make it visible by going to the "view" menu and choosing "select columns..."). If there is a high number of threads, then you need to look for a machine with a multicore CPU - probably an i7xxxxQM, which are hyperthreaded quad cores. If the number of threads is low, then just look for the highest clock speed you can find.

    If I was going to guess, I'd say excel will be lightly threaded and MATLAB heavily, but it's not really my area of expertise...

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    Quote Originally Posted by scaryjim View Post
    With appropriate software that's probably true, but I don't think either Excel or MATLAB can utilise GPGPU.

    The key thing is whether either of those programs is heavily threaded, and here the OP can check - just fire up one of your existing calculations on the current machine, stat Task Manager, in the "processes" tab find excel.exe or whatever the matlab exe is called (matlab.exe perhaps? ) and look for the "threads" column (you may need to make it visible by going to the "view" menu and choosing "select columns..."). If there is a high number of threads, then you need to look for a machine with a multicore CPU - probably an i7xxxxQM, which are hyperthreaded quad cores. If the number of threads is low, then just look for the highest clock speed you can find.

    If I was going to guess, I'd say excel will be lightly threaded and MATLAB heavily, but it's not really my area of expertise...
    A quick Google suggests there are ways of utilising gpgpu with this software, however it might not be entirely straight forward

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    I've never used GPGPU or multi thread on Matlab before but it doesn't look too hard.

    Otherwise, if you don't fancy coding in parallel, since vanilla Matlab programs are single threaded you should be after a system with good single thread performance. In general, look for a machine with an Intel chip with the greatest clock speed you can afford.

    As for memory requirements, this depends on what you're running. If your current machine can handle the programs your throwing at it without Matlab complaining about running out of memory then 4GB will suffice

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Before you go spending thousand bucks on new notebook check memory usage when you'r doing those calculations and look into enabling multi-core support. If 4gb memory is enough and there is no way to enable multi-core support for programs you are using i would suggest going for a desktop computer if possible, you get way more performance than in notebook.

    If notebook is a must and you cant utilize multi thread support for your programs, like DDY suggested look for a highest clocked chip with highest turbo clock. If you Google the line under this paragraph you can find (scroll down to "mobile processors" table) list of newest available intel notebook processors. Under "Nominal TDP" you have default CPU speed, and under "1 core turbo" you have Turbo Core speed. Speed CPU will work when only 1 core is "working". Basically what you need.
    *ivy bridge (microarchitecture)*

    I've found 1 model that could meet all your requirements Lenovo y580 Core i7 (2.9ghz normal speed and 3.6ghz turbo). Nice gpu for gaming an even high settings. Drawback is glossy screen. around 1000$ on newegg.


    Also if you can look into GPGPU support and cuda programming as few of my uni friends started using it and are thrilled about computing speed they have in comparison to using raw cpu power.

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Quote Originally Posted by darkydark View Post
    Before you go spending thousand bucks on new notebook check memory usage when you'r doing those calculations and look into enabling multi-core support. If 4gb memory is enough and there is no way to enable multi-core support for programs you are using i would suggest going for a desktop computer if possible, you get way more performance than in notebook.

    If notebook is a must and you cant utilize multi thread support for your programs, like DDY suggested look for a highest clocked chip with highest turbo clock. If you Google the line under this paragraph you can find (scroll down to "mobile processors" table) list of newest available intel notebook processors. Under "Nominal TDP" you have default CPU speed, and under "1 core turbo" you have Turbo Core speed. Speed CPU will work when only 1 core is "working". Basically what you need.
    *ivy bridge (microarchitecture)*

    I've found 1 model that could meet all your requirements Lenovo y580 Core i7 (2.9ghz normal speed and 3.6ghz turbo). Nice gpu for gaming an even high settings. Drawback is glossy screen. around 1000$ on newegg.


    Also if you can look into GPGPU support and cuda programming as few of my uni friends started using it and are thrilled about computing speed they have in comparison to using raw cpu power.

    Ironically this is the computer I purchased, did a lot of research and I came up with the same solution as you haha. I took delivery about 3 weeks ago.

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    http://www.mathworks.co.uk/support/s...rrent_release/

    Matlab system requirements can be found on the link above.
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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    Quote Originally Posted by pctech2012 View Post
    http://www.mathworks.co.uk/support/s...rrent_release/

    Matlab system requirements can be found on the link above.
    Yes you can also run Matlab on Intel Atom laptops but thats not what hes looking for. He's simulating large amounts of arrays thats how matlab runs it sees data mostly as arrays and matrices and finds their corresponding algorithm.

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    Re: Need Advice: Laptop for Financial Simulations

    I use Matlab as well I have had a few simulation problems I can say for sure i3 and i5 wont do you good I used these platforms and they didnt cope very well. You will need to look at a i7 quad core laptop I used that and it is far superior and coping with algorithms I presented it.
    The following laptop I think is good deal for you it has the latest Intel cpu Ivy bridge and its quad core cpu most cable at handling the stresses of your algorithm on matlab, it also has a dedicated graphics card(you will be able to play bf3 on it) which is pretty good and last but not least you can claim £100 back from Lenovo. (Laptop Lenovo IdeaPad Z580 Core i7 http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Lenov...UK/version.asp and the cash back from here its z series laptop https://lenovo-saving.com/en/summer-...43&PID=1546795 )
    I believe the above deal after cash back will come to £524 you can then put the money you get in cash back in a SSD I would recommend a Crucial M4 256gb drive for your laptop hope this helps you out.
    Last edited by Xnemesis; 11-09-2012 at 04:19 AM.

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