JPMorgan Chase has a massive amount of data to analysis on a constant basis, especially around risk and fraud detection. In the presentation below, they take us through their reasoning and usage of FPGA's, over other technologies such as GPU's.

Fantastic read, and well worth the time spent to read it.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/110511-slides.pdf

JP Morgan used to take eight hours to do a complete risk run, and an hour to run a present value, on its entire book. If anything went wrong with the analysis, there was no time to re-run it. It has now reduced that to about 238 seconds, with an FPGA time of 12 seconds.

Typically JP Chase used C++ for analysis and Python. The new Maxeler Risk system is Java code based. The project took JP Morgan around three years, and the bank is now looking to push it into other areas of the business, such as high frequency trading.