[Info-vax] OT: London stock exchange switches to Linux

[ja]

On Jan 25, 8:52 pm, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Jan 25, 11:27 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> > London stock exchange switches to Linux
>
> >http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1588339/london-stock-exchang...
>
> > Remember a couple of years back when the LSE tried to run their
> > operation on Window Server 2003?
>
> > NSR
>
> There is a passing mention at the end of that article of the latest
> fad in computerised trading, "high frequency trading". If you want to
> read about what it is in market terms, there's plenty to read
> elsewhere (though it may not be pleasant reading for those who think
> the financial sector should serve its customers, rather than the other
> way round).
>
> There are also "reader comments" at the end of the Inquirer article.
> So far, the commenters seem to think that VMS expertise is no longer
> available. Can that be true, or is it just that the remaining VMS
> folks have sufficiently strict criteria that City-oriented jobs aren't
> appealing?
>
> Anyway, in technical terms, high frequency trading needs a computing
> platform with consistent low-millisecond-level latencies and response
> times. Sometimes the compute workload is allegedly so intense that
> part of it has to be offloaded to dedicated compute engines such as
> FPGA cards and such. Obviously that kind of predictable responsiveness
> makes Windows entirely inappropriate, any fool could have seen that
> coming, but Billco managed to lunch enough Accenture and LSE staff to
> fool them initially.
>
> Windows may not have been up to the job, but a "soft real time" OS
> such as a Linux with a pre-emptible kernel is probably entirely
> capable of "good enough" performance. VMS could do it too, but that's
> another story, one seemingly of insufficient interest to HP and its
> "partners".
>
> There's nothing particularly new in this LSE story, some folks have
> been doing this kind of thing for a year or three. Like HP, for
> example, and Novell/SuSe, in this 2008 press release (there were other
> similar ones from other x86 folk before and after this one). The HP
> group in this picture is of course the Proliant folks, with x86-64
> blades. Note that this press release isn't a trading application, it's
> a Reuters messaging thing, but there are similarities in the
> requirements:
>
> http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-sets-new-performance-records-...
>
> Another SuSe example, this time from June 2009 on IBM x86-64 hardware,
> talks about saving 30 microseconds latency in a UDP multicast
> messaging application:http://blog.29west.com/2009/06/23/lbm-latency-linux-10-gigabit-ethern...
>
> "The report tested throughput as well as latency. Using small messages
> (64-bytes), 3 publishing applications on a single server could
> generate almost 2.5 million messages per second. With larger (1204-
> byte) messages, 3 publishing applications on a single server could
> generate 550,000 messages per second driving the network to over 4.5
> gbps."
>
> Nice.
>
> Based on what's gone before, I'd say the technology may well exist for
> the LSE to do their migration within a year (JF's question). Whether
> sufficient skilled people are available is a slightly different
> question, but there seem to be a handful of companies claiming
> competence in this space.
>
> Next question: why would anyone want an x86 mainframe, even for a job
> like this? Unisys did do them (their ES7000 line), and for a while
> Compaq rebadged them as Proliant 9000. It's a tiny tiny market. Blades
> and even rack mount servers have got what most enterprise customers
> want, with the exception (for now) of an answer for those folks who
> for some reason need single system image massive-memory massive-SMP
> systems. Massive in this context currently means a workload that needs
> more than today's biggest Proliant offering: iirc, 8 sockets (with 6
> cores per socket ie 48CPUs) and 512GB of memory. For anything bigger
> than that kind of system, HP's current offer is IA64 (for now).
>
> Interesting times.

Nice summary, thank you! ISE in NYC is another account with similar
properties to LSE.