BlueFlow Ltd (2007-11)

Title: Investigation into the use of FPGA technology for data mining of financial investment data
Research Engineer: Robert McWilliam
Sponsor: BlueFlow Ltd , Aberdeen
Academic Supervision: TBC
Industrial Supervision: Dr Andrew Starkey

BlueFlow Ltd is a spinout company from the University of Aberdeen and holds the exclusive license to patent pending technology that allows for an automated form of data mining. This concept has been developed for use specifically within the financial investment field. A software product has been developed that is capable of the analysis of a number of financial data sources concurrently so that correlations in these sources can be identified that lead to consistent profitable predictions in some target market.

Additionally, the process will look to optimise analysis techniques that can be applied to improve the predictions, and to apply any normalisation techniques and other methods of combining data sources that help in increasing the predicted profit for the identified correlations. The software product is designed in a parallel compute node paradigm so that large amounts of data can be processed by simply increasing the number of processing nodes available to the system. However, even with many optimisation steps having been undertaken throughout the system the overall process can still be slow due to the current OS architecture.

The use of FPGA technologies in this area could have an enormous impact on the speed of analysis and allow a much more exhaustive and thorough analysis of the data to be undertaken.

This project will investigate and develop a version of the financial data mining tool for use with the FPGA chip device, identify the key issues of data flow and data re-use and how to solve them, and provide benchmarking of the proposed solution using FPGA technologies against the current solution which uses a more traditional computing approach.