## Distributed QuantLib using AWS Lambda

Here I present a proof of concept for running QuantLib functions in AWS Lambda.

AWS Lambda offers an exciting way to leverage distributed computing without worrying about infrastructure or server provisioning, all you need to do is upload your Lambda function and trigger it using one of the supported triggers. It automatically scales to the size of your workload and you only pay for the amount of time your code was running in Lambda down to a 100 ms interval.

Your AWS Lambda function runs in Amazon’s custom Linux environment which is available as a machine image called Amazon Linux AMI. You must first compile QuantLib in Amazon’s Linux environment. You can either spin up an EC2 instance to do that or you can download and host the VirtualBox image of the Amazon’s Linux environment. I went the second route. Out of the box, Amazon Linux is pretty bare bones and you need to install “Development Tools” package and upgrade python to 3.7 From then on, its the compile QuantLib as usual and create python bindings.

When you upload your Lambda function to AWS, you have two choices when it comes to your dependencies. Either you can package them along with your function or you can use Lambda Layers. The advantage of using Layers is that you can abstract away your dependencies into a package separately and keep reusing the layer for your functions. It also reduces your function package size as there are limits on the size (250 MB). Keep in mind that, the layers are zip files and will be unzipped by AWS environment before running your function. Since QuantLib compiles into .so files, we need to make sure that the files will be unzipped into the correct path on the Lambda instance where Lambda runtime can find them.

I have already gone through this exercise and have created Layers and have made them public as shown in the table below. You will need to reference those ARN (amazon resource name) if you want to add these layers to your Lambdas. I have also used a publicly available Numpy Layer from KLayer in my Lambda functions to provide numpy functionality.

LayerARN
QuantLib116-java-java-layer
arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:734853675260:layer:QuantLib116-java-java-layer:1
QuantLib116-native-java-layer
arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:734853675260:layer:QuantLib116-native-java-layer:1
QuantLib116-native-python-layer
arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:734853675260:layer:QuantLib116-native-python-layer:1
QuantLib116-python-python-layer
arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:734853675260:layer:QuantLib116-python-python-layer:1
Klayers-python37-numpyarn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:113088814899:layer:Klayers-python37-numpy:1

If you are developing Python 3.7 Lambda function, you will need to include both the python layers from the above table.

Now comes the fun part of writing the Lambda functions. For this demo, I am going to borrow from Mikael Katajamäki’s excellent blog at Exposure Simulation which shows swap exposure simulations for computing expected positive exposure using Hull-White One Factor model. On my laptop, the script takes about 7 and a half minutes to compute swap NPVs for 500 paths and 262 dates for one swap. I have re-engineered the original code so that I have one “worker” function that takes in a path and computes swap NPVs over the date grid, the time step for simulations is 1 week. There is one “controller” Lambda that generates the 500 random paths based on QuantLib HullWhiteProcess and then calls worker Lambdas asynchronously. There is a local script running on my laptop that uses boto3 library to call the controller Lambda to kick off the entire workflow. Each worker Lambda writes the NPVs it has calculated to a file in an S3 bucket that has been specified as environment variable to the Lambda. For the purposes of this demo, the local script keeps polling that S3 bucket to see how many files are available, once we have 500 files (as there are 500 paths) , the script assumes all the work is done and aggregates the results. I am sure there are better ways to signal when all worker Lambda have finished, probably using DynamoDB and atomic counters or using SQS/SNS queues.

To aid in passing required parameters from controller to worker lambda, I save the intermediate data to a file on S3. For example, dates and discount factors needed to build market term structure are loaded in from S3 bucket in both Lambdas. The simulated fixings generated in Controller are saved to S3 and then read by worker Lambdas. The location and file names in S3 are specified as environment variables.

All the code is available at https://github.com/suhasghorp/QuantLib-Lambda

Here are some relevant portions of the controller Lambda function:

Here is how Controller Lambda calls Worker Lambdas:

Using AWS Lambda cold-start, the time taken to compute swap NPVs for 500 paths and 262 dates is about 2 minutes compared to 7 and half minutes on my laptop. After kicking off the controller Lambda, I wait for a minute for the output s3 bucket to have some files, this can be optimized by using another signalling mechanism like queues. The Lambdas themselves can be warmed up before hand so that dependencies are loaded and they are ready to go which could save additional time. In the end, I think AWS ecosystem presents an interesting alternative to multi-threading or GPU based computing solutions.

## Estimating Potential Future Exposure with QuantLib and AWS EMR – Part II

In my previous post, we saw how to submit a Pyspark job to AWS EMR cluster. In this post, I will go over the setup of the cluster.

Before we start with the cluster, we must have a certificate keypair (.pem file) and a security group setup in AWS. There are many resources available online for this and I will not go into the details.

Next is selecting the custom AMI that I mentioned in my previous post as a base machine for all nodes in the cluster so that Anaconda Python and QuantLib are already installed on the nodes.  The AMI that I used is publicly available for now, it costs me about 5 per month to keep it alive. The details of the AMI are as shown below. I selected 1 m3xlarge (4 cores, 15 GB) machine for my master node and 3 r4x8large (16 cores, 244 GB) machines for my worker nodes. I also always select spot pricing for all my nodes. Once the cluster is up and running (in waiting mode), first you need to secure copy spark-pfe.py file (available at my github repo spark-pfe github repo) to the master node and then you can SSH into master node to run the job using spark-submit script from previous post. It took about 7 minutes for Pyspark job to complete, it computed netting set NPV for 5000 simulations across future 454 dates for 2 swaps and 1 FxFwd. The output of the simulation was written to S3 bucket and now its time to pull it onto local machine for analysis. Loading the NPV cube on a local machine is fine for demonstration purposes as we have only 5000 simulations but I would load the NPV cube into Amazon Redshift or AuroraDB for production purposes. We will use boto3 library for downloading the files from S3. Once we have the time grid and NPV cube in memory, we can do some plots to visualize the simulated exposure paths. The Blue paths are for Collateralized exposures and Red are for Uncollateralized. Now we can calculate and plot the Expected Exposure where we just take the positive exposures from the above simulated exposure paths. Now we can plot the PFE curves where we take the 95% quantile of above expected exposures. We can now calculate the Maximum PFE for both the curves. #### Maximum Uncollateralized PFE: 260,962.61 #### Maximum Collateralized PFE: 252,916.08 The spark-submit script that I have used is by no means optimized. I have tried tuning the various spark memory and number of executors parameters in a trial and error approach within a limited time frame I had. The configuration I came up with is optimal for the cluster I used but I am sure it can be improved. Thanks for stopping by. ## Swap Curve construction using Global Optimization In my previous post, I discussed option Implied Volatility and Binomial Model. In this post, we switch gears and discuss Swap Curve construction. Building a swap curve is so fundamental to interest rate derivatives pricing that it is probably one of most closely guarded proprietary information on the trading desk. Pricing an interest rate swap involves bootstrapping a blended curve of different instruments based on their maturities and market liquidity. Usually cash deposits, Eurodollar futures are used at the short end and market swap rates are used at the long end. At the long end, however, we have only a subset of market swap rates available and bootstrapping requires all the missing rates to be interpolated from known rates. This makes interpolation methodology a critical part of curve building. Also, since forward rates are a gradient of the discount rates, any misalignment in the latter is magnified in the former. There is an alternative approach to bootstrapping called global optimization approach, where the short end of the curve is bootstrapped as usual but at the longer end we “guess” the forward rates, compute the par rates of the market swaps and minimize the error between the actual par rates and the computed par rates. We also add a smoothness constraint to the minimization procedure so that overall gradient of the curve is minimized. This approach is illustrated in the excellent book Swaps and Other derivatives 2nd Ed by Richard Flavell I will use QuantLib to generate swap schedules and to deal with business day conventions. QuantLib can of course generate a fully built swap curve but I will use Scipy’s optimize package for curve building. My objective was to match Spreadsheet 3.9 “Building a blended curve” from the above book. Unfortunately, the spreadsheet does not actually show the equations for Excel’s Solver used for optimization but shows the final result, so that leaves considerable ambiguity in understanding which I hope I will be able to clear. ##### Note on QuantLib and Python There are numerous resources online on how to build QuantLib from sources and then build the Python extensions, I would like to point you to the precompiled package for QuantLib-Python maintained by Christoph Gohlke. If you are on windows, you can just install the whl package and get started. First some common formulae we will be using: $$Discount Factor : DF_t = \frac{1}{(1 + r_t * d_t)}$$ whered_t$is year fraction and$r_t$is annual rate $$Forward Rate : F_{t/T} = \frac{[(DF_t/DF_T)- 1]}{(T-t)}$$ where$DF_t$is disocunt factor to t and$DF_T$is disocunt factor to T (both from today) $$Par Rate of Swap: \frac{(1-D_T)}{\sum_{n=1}^n(\Delta_n * D_n)}$$ where$D_T$is maturity date discount factor,$\Delta_n$are the time fractions between 2 reset dates and$D_n\$ are the various reset date discount factors.

gtol termination condition is satisfied.
Function evaluations: 20, initial cost: 1.7812e-03, final cost 1.5585e-09, first-order optimality 1.04e-08.
### Scipy optimization took:2.5262434 seconds