Amortization schedule for 500,000 loans

I am brand new to this forum and to Matlab. My task is to find a quick method to calculate the monthly cash flow on nearly 500,000 loans. However, this problem cannot be solved with a simple amortization schedule. The loans have a variety of attributes like periodic reset dates, caps, floors and balloon dates. Some are variable, some fixed rate and nearly all of them are aged to some degree (months or years). Let’s ramp it up a bit, after running the amortization schedules, I need to input different sets of prepayment speed assumptions, then run it all again… 20 more times! My best estimate is that there are nearly 18 billion calculations: 500,000 loans, up to 360 months each, 5 or more calculations per month and 20 different prepay scenarios.

I am very familiar with Excel/VBA and have created a code ‘loop’ which works flawlessly. Trouble is that Excel doesn't have the capacity to perform these tasks quickly.

For starters, I’d like to know: Is Matlab suitable for this type of project? Can I use a desktop PC?

Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

[José-Luis]

If you want code that runs fast, then Matlab might not the best tool for that. It is an interpreted language, and it might have a hard time beating compiled languages. Of course crappy code in a compiled language will be slower than the Matlab equivalent (provided the equivalent itself is not crappy)

If you want to write code fast, then you are in the right place.

18 billion calculations, while it sounds daunting could be done with a vanilla desktop pc. These days, a vanilla pc can reach the hundreds of GFLOPS. Could take less than a minute, a few hours, could take months, hard to say without knowing more details.