What Desktop Do I Needed To Run Simulation/Monte Carlo

tommcginnis said:
Back in the day, I used to run an electric utility model, in which rates, financials, operations/maintenance, and generation fleet, were all taken out 20-30 years. This was computed by a high speed 80386 CPU, WITH the 80387 math co-processor. Written to a *giant* floppy disk (a 20mb Bernoulli Box, for those that remember -- 20mb! Who's ever gonna use all that?!?)

The basic engine was Monte Carlo. After some tweaking and fine-tuning, it took 3-4 hours.

"Yeah: coding issue." :D
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You didn't use the IBM 7030? :D
 
toon said:
How many scenarios does your simulation have? It may take long time if you have too many scenarios.
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From 1993 to 2019, ~6500 days - scenarios, each is a bunch of calculation on option prices, combinations.... If I ran 10 scenarios, it took a few seconds for the computer to spit out the answer.
 
The professor who taught Excel VBA in Coursera said it is better to use Window for computation heavy tasks rather than Mac.

So, I am looking at PC desktops, way cheaper than Mac with the same Intel processor. I will follow TheBidShort and look for core i9 with lots of cache and ram.

Thank you for all your helps.
 
ironchef said:
The professor who taught Excel VBA in Coursera said it is better to use Window for computation heavy tasks rather than Mac.

So, I am looking at PC desktops, way cheaper than Mac with the same Intel processor. I will follow TheBidShort and look for core i9 with lots of cache and ram.

Thank you for all your helps.
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iron chef, I was only being sarcastic! You don't need a core i9. Macs are awesome. I still love my core i5 mac book pro that's 3 years old. Your code is off. Your Mac loves running monte carlo simulations. That's like the easiest task for it.

You know whats going to give me a good laugh? You end up paying 5k for a high end desktop only to see your monte carlo simulation take 6 hours!

also that professor has a few screws loose. Excel is single threaded. Your not going to get that big of a speed boost (very minimal) going from a core i7 to a core i9. Where you get the speed boost is making use of the additional cores by running the code in parallel. How many steps do you have in this simulation? It sounds like 1000000000000 :p

With all that said. It's not a bad idea to spend the cash to build your own PC (what i did recetnly). Make sure you buy a top of the line mother board and a decent size case so you have room to "grow". This will save you money in the long run. FWIW I have a core i7 with 8 cores (same as what you have).
 
I almost forgot to mention the most important part. If you are going to be doing these often and you want to do more in depth analysis. Learn a programming language. That will make your simulations run way faster than any hardware upgrade. $30 a month for data camp or $10 a month for skill share. Better bang for your buck and long term goals.
 
Absolutely. Nothing is more cumbersome than vba. Every kid can learn python and they have packages that generate MC simulations and all associated stats and graphs. Same with R. Anyone who states they are too old to learn this should probably retire for good.

TheBigShort said:
I almost forgot to mention the most important part. If you are going to be doing these often and you want to do more in depth analysis. Learn a programming language. That will make your simulations run way faster than any hardware upgrade. $30 a month for data camp or $10 a month for skill share. Better bang for your buck and long term goals.
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TheBigShort said:
With all that said. It's not a bad idea to spend the cash to build your own PC (what i did recetnly). Make sure you buy a top of the line mother board and a decent size case so you have room to "grow". This will save you money in the long run. FWIW I have a core i7 with 8 cores (same as what you have).
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Building my own PC? Like asking a baby to do calculus. :(

I am just starting to program VBA, so there are a lot of rooms for improvement. How do I know the codes are correct? I hand calculated the equations and verified that all the numbers and steps came out in agreement.

Thank you for your coaching.
 
TheBigShort said:
I almost forgot to mention the most important part. If you are going to be doing these often and you want to do more in depth analysis. Learn a programming language. That will make your simulations run way faster than any hardware upgrade. $30 a month for data camp or $10 a month for skill share. Better bang for your buck and long term goals.
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I thought VBA is sort of a programming language? I took classes in Excel and Excel VBA from Coursera. I am starting another class: programming in MATLAB? Why, I want to see if it is a better language for doing noise filtering?
 
GRULSTMRNN said:
Absolutely. Nothing is more cumbersome than vba. Every kid can learn python and they have packages that generate MC simulations and all associated stats and graphs. Same with R. Anyone who states they are too old to learn this should probably retire for good.
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Thanks for the suggestion.

I will drop MATLAB and find classes in python and R. How do they interface with my Excel data sets?
 
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