[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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