One area where SAS has helped a customer make real performance gains is a risk scenario at UOB Bank in Singapore. Its chief risk officer observed that it took them 18 hours to calculate risk for trading operations on any given day. This meant that the resulting data would have no bearing on the current operations, so he asked SAS if this could be accelerated.

SAS reviewed this and through new hardware and the latest in-memory analytics tools it was able to reduce this risk calculation down to 15 seconds. Goodnight noted this task from a technological standpoint was not complex as risk calculations are not new or much different from the past. The difference today is the sheer amount of data and processing required in producing the resulting risk models.

"Computational intensity is the challenge, we estimated the system has to speed up from processing two-billion instructions per second into 200 trillion instructions per second," Goodnight said.