[PLUG] London Stock Exchange - $Soft out, Linux/Solaris in
Keith Lofstrom
keithl at kl-ic.com
Thu Oct 8 02:03:26 UTC 2009
Pete Lancashire wrote:
> London Stock Exchange is dumping a .NET-
> based system for an open source -based system:
> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2568
On Wed, Oct 07, 2009 at 10:38:46AM -0700, Rob Saul wrote:
> Interesting. Just this morning I was wondering what sort
> of inroads OSS has made at this 'level'.
The financial/investment community has had a strong commitment
to Unix for decades. The remaining question was when to move
from Unix to Linux, and most large firms made the back-office
conversion years ago. Most of the desktop is still M$.
In fact, OSS has already moved to the next level. The battle
for the kernel is raging between better latency and better batch
throughput. In environments where being 1msec late for a trade
can cost thousands of dollars, hundreds of times a day, low
latency wins. This was the subject of one of the talks at
Linuxcon (by a coder for a big European stock trader, IIRC),
who was showing how latency was increasing in recent kernels.
I suspect he just needs to recompile his kernels ...
On the other side of the battle is shops processing humongous
amounts of data. There are user-level equivalents of this
battle; I do a lot a bulk computing, and have different kernel
needs than a gamer.
So we may already be in the late stages of the war, with the
defeat of the M$ Axis in sight, and beginning the squabble over
post-war borders.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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