[Info-vax] OT: Toronto considering using trading platform that closed London market for hours

[Neil Rieck]

On Feb 25, 3:00 pm, "Syltrem" <syltremz... at videotron.ca> wrote:
> http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/Toronto-considering-using-capress-35...
>
> Anyone knows what platform that was ?
> And how about for TSX ?
>
> Syltrem

I have no "facts" to offer except to say that this rumor sounds
backwards. The Toronto s/w would probably end up in London because the
deal also involves intellectual property.

A few years back (2008) the LSE converted to a system based upon a
large array of x86 (HP Proliant) servers running Windows Server 2003.
Yes, they were also working with .NET apps. This was a total disaster
and a year later in 2009 the LSE converted to Linux (I seem to recall
SUSE but don't quote me on this). Their application s/w came from a
third party company

Through "gossip" at the University of Waterloo division of the IEEE it
was my understanding that:

TSE/TSX Toronto developers developed their own trading system based
upon Tandem running Nonstop. When Tandem hardware was never properly
ported to Alpha (here, I am specifically referring to the ability of
multiple CPUs to run their instructions in lock-step), these folks
reacted violently and vowed to never allow their application s/w to be
trapped on specially hardware again. So they modified their apps so
they could be easily built to run on either UNIX or LINUX. I keep
hearing rumors about RED HAT LINUX but don't quote me on this.

Maybe someone directly involved in either the London or Toronto end of
this deal will add some facts.

NSR

p.s. I just stumbled onto a few related articles

2008
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_suffers_net_crash

2009
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform

2011
(latest incident came just two weeks after the LSE suffered a
technical problem following the migration of a new trading system)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/lse-trading-hit-by-tech-problem/article1920357/
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/02/25/markets-britain-shares-outage-idUKLDE71O0JB20110225