[PLUG] London Stock Exchange - $Soft out, Linux/Solaris in

Pete Lancashire pete at petelancashire.com
Mon Oct 12 15:31:22 UTC 2009



> In fact, OSS has already moved to the next level.  The battle
> for the kernel is raging between better latency and better batch
> throughput.

> I suspect he just needs to recompile his kernels ...

Maybe, but in a recent discussion in a (near) real time list and
from Linus's own recent rant the kernel is getting bloated. We do
have one advantage that $Soft will never have and that is control
over the kernel. I've been playing around with schedulers since
I to have ...

> 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.

.. the above issue, I have one client where they run one single
large ETL process every hour, to them is is all block I/O. Saving
a couple milliseconds for a disk request or a ftp transfer ends
up saving them many minutes by the time 200-400 GB has been sifted

Another place I am aware of is doing HFT, High Frequency Trading. These
are the guys that are trying to shave not milliseconds but microseconds
off. They make the stock exchange guys look like they are using
calculators. They only have 60 employees, 12 with PhDs and have a
full time kernel hacker. They never even considered $Soft, they
still do work with a couple of 12 proc 4 core Suns. Alas they are
not in PDX.

One thing that would be interesting is a GUI (for the non techie)
users out there that could let the turn a few of the knobs, or at
least have 3 or 4 buttons for kernel options. Maybe not needed
now but soon.

> 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.

Hopefully we learn a few things if not that Pogo comic strip will
become true again.

-pete



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