As for Deutsche Boerse, let me not use the word dinosaur as that is not appropriate terminology here.
Yes i worked at a few hundreds of meters away from it. Their old datacenter used gigabit ethernet and the total processing time of a single trade was in the many milliseconds. So the maximum amount of trades a second one could do in the same instrument a second was pretty limited. Say 100-200 or so. Moving their new datacenter to infiniband and newer software processing, their processing time probably will get similar to LSE which is just above a 100 microseconds. So that is a speedup of factor 100 nearly. That will also mean that most traders will during those 30 minutes of a surge trade a factor 100 more a second. That also means there will be up to factor 100 more datapoints per second that the traders need to store at home and simulate with. That also means they simply need factor 10000 more processing power at home. As you might know Monte Carlo, a rather primitive algorithm to simulate the financial data, is a searching algorithm. Search is exponential, so even factor 10k more processing power won't handle factor 100 more datapoints. The branching factor and how far you want to look ahead determines the additional exponential processing power you need. If i were chief of Mellanox or Qlogics, i'd keep my office opened 24 hours a day for the wave of traders that will want to upgrade. More large exchanges will soon move towards newer hardware as well. Gigabit ethernet was the defacto standard and this dinosaur manner of doing things is getting replaced exchange by exchange now to bigger pipes that can handle more data a second. That gives an explosion in the calculation power the traders needs, and one by one they are realizing it. Basically they first need to lose a couple of hundreds of millions, some larger ones in the billions, prior to realizing what they're doing wrong - and some still are asleep. Yet the reality of the market is that companies are pretty healthy now, yet they dont' make big profits. Furthermore things could go down pretty quickly. When i analyzed the local stock exchange i saw that nothing is really "a buy". What's cheap is companies that are really in trouble. In this volatile landscape the only thing that really CAN make you money now is high frequency trading and nothing else makes great cash. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
