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Wall Street Becoming a Linux Stronghold
alphadogg recommends an article about the rise of Linux on Wall Street. We discussed the beginnings of this trend last year. From NetworkWorld:
"Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than it's worth. Linux providers, speaking this week at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference in New York City, stated their cases that Wall Street firms have nothing to fear about diving into open source. Red Hat and Novell argued that's especially true now that specialized Real Time Linux has been developed that meets strict low-latency and messaging requirements of brokerages and trading firms."
This will surely usher in the year of Linux on the desktop!
Ironically though, the Wall Street Journal, pride of the überrightwing Murdoch Empire -- News Corpse International -- is still as M$ fan boy as any good rightwinger should be.
what you term as 'left wing' news in /. pertains to freedom of the masses in regard to life and internet, what you term as 'psuedo-politics' affects the lives of ALL of us and what we care on the tech world. if many small fights were not won in the areas you so ignorantly despise, today red hat and novell would not be able to make a speech to wall street praising linux.
Read radical news here
well after reading TFA i was wondering if Solaris 8 or 9 where really performing like they say: " meets strict low-latency and messaging requirements of brokerages and trading firms."
uhmm AFAIK there using SUN boxes and solaris ( IBM and the rest is also there ) and those did not have "RealTime"
SO,
well i just did put some stuff here so let me be a karma whore.
sorry for the inconvenience
I have a few friends who became quants around 2000, and they used Linux for the majority of their work.
I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet."
Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.
I suppose they could use OpenOffice-server, and I've considered playing around with it, but it seems like too much unnecessary overhead. Right now I think I'm gonna give JExcelAPI a whirl as soon as I get a break in between projects.
I interpreted it as Linux now fulfills the hard real-time requirements with these vendor-specific bundles that Sun and Microsoft don't.
And Linux will never replace mainframes. Nothing will.
At the risk of being modded troll, OO Calc will probably never replace Excel - other than Suns and big iron, corporate america runs on Microsoft Excel (not necessarily a good thing, but still).
OTOH, I know companies that are still running their websites and outward-facing interface systems on hardware and software that could be easily replaced by off-the shelf open source stuff, which will probably save them a lot of money.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Excuse me? He could tell them that only changes to the actual code need to be contributed back to the community, and furthermore, that code used within the company and never released does not have to be contributed.
But what does this spokesman for Linux say? That it's illegal but that there's no way to get caught? Does he work for Microsoft?
The article includes a lot of confusion and/or FUD about licensing.
Someone needs to sit down with some of these people and explain to them what the GPL actually says. It doesn't require software written to run on Linux to be GPL'd. Even if you had some reason why you wanted to modify the Linux kernel itself (and why the hell would a Wall Street firm want to!?), you wouldn't need to GPL your modifications unless you were turning around and selling or distributing the modified version publicly.
We seem to be getting a lot of this kind of idiocy recently. Maybe it's good news -- it might just be a sign that a lot of PHBs are getting open source on their radar for the first time. But you'd think that lawyers and journalists would at least get it straight before they published their thoughts on the web.
Find free books.
Wall Street has been a Linux stronghold for nearly ten years already. This meeting at the FCA Conference was a gathering of the clueless.
It's these trying times, defined as they are by political extremism everywhere threatening our once-secure way of life. I'm sure many of us hope to return to a more relaxed atmosphere, so we can once again afford the luxury of political apathy. I know I do!
Caveat Utilitor
I work at a Big American Investment Bank, right in the heart of the financial district of New York, and I can tell you that one of our most important technologies that supports pretty much all of our trading systems and pricing algorithms is run on an international Linux computing cluster. Hell, they've got us wrappers for all the usual Linux commands (grep, cat, pipes, etc) so we can use them in the Windows command line.
.Net, since that goes pretty well with everybody's WinXP environment.
However, every single person's desktop is a WinXP with all the usual MSFT goodies. Excel is used extensively by everyone that doesn't code but has to work with numbers. Lots of desktop apps are
Or badly quoted out of context.
But The Linux Foundation needs to IMMEDIATELY address that with the CORRECT quote or the context.
Either that or immediately kick his idiot ass to the curb.
Fyi, most slashdotters really never cared for Linux except to the extent they thought it would drive "M$" bankrupt.
You don't remember such a time, because such a time never existed. For either contention.
In the end, the community IS the support. Consider the concept of "guaranteed" vendor support. All to often, support calls go straight to an Indian call center, often with disappointing results.
Although many open source problems depend on the volunteer efforts of the community, I'll stack of the community vs. a 3rd world call center any day of the week.
In a previous life, I worked in a large data center that was a DEC shop. Back in the day, DEC support was awesome. If your computer crashed, field service would dial in via dedicated modem, read the crash dump, and determined the appropriate course of action. None of this "reboot and see what happens" nonsense. That level of vendor support is long gone.
In the open source model, you _might_ have a vendor contract, but there is ALSO the community, and the all-important last line of defense, your own IT staff. Any of these people can see the source code. Compare this to modern-day closed-source support, where only the vendor can see the source code, and they are unlikely to change it until they feel like it. The user community can't see the source code, and the local IT dept. is limited to whatever the man from Mumbai tells them to try next.
So, if you have money (as they surely do on Wall St.), you can afford to pay for a support contract, backed up by the user community and competent local IT staff, providing 3 levels of defense against problems. I'll take that over a call to the Bangalore Bargain Bin any day of the week!
I work for the most successful Wall St. investment bank and it is true. Pretty much all of our internal server machines are linux, yes they have pretty much pushed solaris out of the picture but no one would foolishy allow windows anywhere in the internal server environment.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
The list that proves you wrong is right here
Now go back to the kid's table and play with your toys. The grownups are talking important business. We know you're enthusiastic about today's fad but we don't care. We have work to do and that means using tools that don't have the lifespan of a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just take a look around... Linux is popping up everywhere these days! Just tonight I happen to land myself at Tucows.com (second only to download.com). Just take a good look at what it says on the front page. :)
If the top shareware, freeware, and whateverware sites on the web start promoting "Linux Software" to the masses (Mom and Pop, everyone in general), then what is going on?
Wall Street of all people should know the economic advantages of Open Source solutions compared to the proprietary alternatives (all things considered, of course...to be fair). This really comes as no surprise.
The list that proves you wrong is right here
Both pie charts have the same date, November 2007.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you are thinking of macros, OOo will support them soon.
I hope so, about a week ago I was emailed a lease form and I tried to open it with NeoOffice, the Mac native port of OO.org, and it didn't display properly. After that I checked what version is installed though which is 2.1. The current available version for download is 2.2.3 which I'll try once I install it. Now I don't know if the doc didn't display properly because of macros or what but I hope the upgrade works.
FalconShould there be a Law?
> code used within the company and never released
Yeah, but what constitutes a software "release"? Hosting a public website with some GPL code linked on the back end may spell trouble. Passing out CDs containing marketing materials at a trade show may constitute a software "release". Not every company is a software company, and when your primary business is not creating software you may not be the most savvy about these sorts of things or have the strictest policies about what your developers, contractors, or consultants can inadvertently do.
Custom software is a major driving factor in most businesses, and there's an understandable undercurrent of cautious distrust of the GPL when the consequences of the smallest touch could unintentionally taint a codebase.
The GP is almost right, for some very specific applications. Though s/he should probably go back to excel. CICS runs very well on IBM big iron under Z/OS. The railroads also use old-style mainframes for routing and control. Transportation and financial processing both have fairly stringent realtime requirements that a Linux cluster can almost certainly meet. Almost is not acceptable though...
I think the difference comes not when you need a redundancy of computing, but when you need a redundancy of low-level hardware, coupled with rock-solid reliability. The ability to physically separate a single server into multiple elements thousands of miles apart is attractive to certain financial institution, for certain transactions. Think arbitrage transactions amongst multiple international exchanges. If the Berlin portion of the server goes down, the NY portion completes my transaction, albiet with some latency...
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You've enabled the trading of trillions of dollars and ginormous salaries for hedge-fund managers based on volunteer-ism.
Nice job! You really showed the capitalists.
Ironically though, the Wall Street Journal, pride of the überrightwing Murdoch Empire -- News Corpse International -- is still as M$ fan boy as any good rightwinger should be.
According to this article, "Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg flirts with Ubuntu" Walt Mossberg is in Apple's camp. He tried a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu and he wasn't too happy, er said it isn't ready for most users yet.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The list is compiled every six months. It takes a while for the results to be tabulated and validated. New results for May 2008 will be available soon.
The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family. That giant pac-man shape represents the 85% share tux had in November. The Windows sliver represents 1.2% or roughly six or seven systems in the top 500 most powerful computers publicly known, for all versions of Windows.
The bottom pie is different because it represents the operating system family's share of processing power. Here you'll note the Windows systems have disappeared entirely. Usually this represents that the scarce Windows systems were in the bottom end of the range or older systems that are not maintaining a proportional share of processing power.
Since you're making the observation that the data is seven months old, are you anticipating some upswell in adoption of Windows among the HPC crowd, who are presumed to know what they're doing and be unswayed by political or marketing concerns? That would be remarkable. If the petaflop Cell processor supercomputer IBM just built called RoadRunner runs Windows I'll eat an original IBM punch card.
What's also remarkable is that Microsoft with its billions can't build and keep a few in-house systems high in this list just to build their HPC credibility and assist their marketing in this area - which they would dearly like to have.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The Journal only came under News Corp's helm in the past year. It's only been since the acquisition that things have really changed to suit Murdoch's taste, according to published reports and accounts from Journal employees. Not to mention Mossberg, the leading technology voice at the Journal, is definitely an Apple fanboy.
Wal-mart is currently in the process of migrating to linux for their in-store backend servers (i.e. the heart of everything)
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
"Hard" real time is industrial robotics and missile guidance systems. This is very much "soft" realtime.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I used to have a position where I met quarterly with most of the major Wall Street CTOs/CIOs. Every one of them was heavily involved in deploying Linux. You could sum up their reasons quite simply: commoditization yields cheaper computing.
All of them were tired of being locked into the hardware that Solaris required (i.e., Sun's vertical stack), and paying Veritas Foundation Suite licensing on top of that. (I mean, come on, no big enterprise shop ever used Solaris Disk Suite as a standard!)
Sure, today you can run Solaris on x86 more credibly and there's ZFS, but three years ago that was still vapor. Sun was too late with them.
The writing on the wall for Sun's big servers has been there for some time. Sun could not afford to cannibalize its enterprise offerings by going whole-hog into Solaris x86, which is why it's always been the poor stepchild. In the meantime, Linux came along, reached maturity, and now anyone wanting to buy a Unixy system can let Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, etc. compete to deliver a cheap x86 box. There's no important differentiation between them, and very few people are buying giant Sun servers any more. Heck, Sun's big Lonestar supercomputer sale was commodity x86 running Linux.
Linux deployments, at least in the sector I worked with, were mainly Unix replacements.
Oh, and a couple responses to the above:
Advice: on VPS providers
Linux is a competitive commodity market.
If you're looking for artificial monopolies & secret police goons, go look in Redmond
thx e
Even more damning for Sun is this:
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/30/os
Even excluding Hybird systems, Linux = 415, Solaris = 2.
Also given that 1 of the systems is SPARC, I would say that there is only a single Solaris x86/x64 system.
Is the era of massive vertical systems over?
No. The Sun has set but there will be contenders to their throne. A creative guy with a good budget could crack the top 10 for under a million bucks and the top 100 for under 100K incredibly shrinky greenbacks. Think GPGPU and PCIe as an interconnect. I could put that in three racks. Smart guys could do a petaflop in one. In the end it's all about the thermals.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The GGP (now) is a common troll on /. and you should know that. He's wrong in every possible way and I think it's a deliberate attempt to draw out reasoned counterpoints. There's no way a messaging campaign intending to serve Microsoft could fail this horribly without being halted.
The type of hardware under discussion could simulate the hardware you're thinking of with little difficulty. In fact, a good systems guy and a good hardware guy could probably put together a nice secure redundant high performance distributed architecture for far less than the mainframe salesmen at IBM can.
But hey, if you are willing to pay for the extra confidence that the brand name gives you, go for it. Maybe your competitors think more clearly and they're the better market.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Depends on how time critical it is .
It's not that difficult to go hard realtime , you just need the right adaptions to the kernel .
Look up RTAI if you are interested.
Slipping shoelaces ?
I support this move, because the Fedora has blown it with me.
The Fedora was on nearly every single financial computer until they started BDing every bank and defense installation in the US. People have had to go away from them because of their world domination ploys. They have helped in a lot areas in the past, but unfortunately that is no more.
There are some huge shoes to fill here, but the main problem is the apps. I think that Solaris to Linux is a huge move, especially with the hardware. This really is a stressful situation that that the Fedora has put people into, and unfortunately people have to step up to the plate. If they like the app, that's great.
Does Wall Street really need anything offered in the realtime kernel patchset? I mean standard preemptive linux has latency that I would think would be drowned by network, disk or human response time... Trades don't happen in millisecond time, do they?
I understand realtime requirements, and I have a half-assed notion of what goes on on the trading floor... what on earth do they have there that demands the realtime patchset?
- the top500 machines are made for showing off computerpower. whereas mainframes have not so much to do with clock cycles, more with handling heavy loads. Probably there are a lot of mainframes in use that can be easily outperformed by my EEE, but do it reliably for years after each other, whereas my EEE would probably be molten by the continuous load.
- because of this, expenses go to fast cpus and fast networks, not so much solid data storage. Of course there is some terabyte storage present, but these are for scratch data storage mostly, there are no backups (some PhD ignored the warning, everything went well of course for a long time. that time was unfortunately before writing the thesis together, so all calculations had to be redone in a few months)
- same for redundancy. If part of a supercomputer goes down, anything running on it is lost. Bad news for a scientist running on it, he needs to restart his work. Impossible news for a Wall Street data processing machine.
- actually I call bogus on this list. The list has become a political cause on itself for countries/organisations to put themselves in the spotlight. Many of the supercomputing tasks could be done more effectively on local smaller clusters. In practice, a supercomputer is built to run as soon as possible the top500 benchmark, after which for the actual users several years of pain start including
MPI hardware incompatibilities, sudden events of slow data access, badly configured queueing systems because the staff is already busy enough dealing with getting the machine to work at all.
- see it like this: probably every machine on that list is a 1st generation product. It has too be, otherwise it is too slow. That means that the staff is faced with a shitload of first generation bugs for which there is no standard protocol to go by. By the time they ironed it out, the machine has gotten redundant, a new "state of the art" has been ordered, and the whole shitty process starts again. I hope it is clear that all these points are not good properties for a mainframe that manages stock handling
I am also wondering if the tone of the parent post is fitting, as the poster seems not to know very much what he is talking about himself. Of course a big part of banking is now also to do simulations of economics, for which they will need clusters. But that work is additional to the mainframe administrative jobs, not substituting it.molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
You said you find bugs and report them so they get integrated back into the kernel. Is that a specialty of OSS, or do you also get this with other proprietary products?
as in
-as easy to identify bugs
-no problem contacting the right people (developers)
-bugs getting fixed on a reasonable timescale
Um, don't be so sure. There's a lot of FUD out there, and much of it comes from the open source community as anywhere else. My point was not that these particular things constitute a 'release', but that there's a grey area that makes companies nervous. As for me, I'll stick with BSD, thanks a bunch.
It is really good to see open source growing every year. That said, if very low latency and security are the current issues facing Wall Street CIOs, Linux would not be my first choice of operating system. After all, data transactions are only as reliable as the network and routing. I would implement a solution using OpenBSD as OpenBSD is arguably the most secure operating system with regular and thorough code reviews. OpenBSD also excels as a routing platform with a lean, highly efficient OSPF and BGP implementation. Some claim that OpenBSD's routing implementation is able to achieve lower latencies than the top Cisco and Big Iron routers. The only possible exception being Juniper because Juniper uses BSD.
Stick to topics that you actually know about kiddo.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I thought not.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Wal-Mart slave here (actually isn't so bad, but that's a different story..) - the in-store servers don't really do that much, mostly just handle the price lookups from the fresh department scales and registers...the really heavy "heart of everything" stuff, inventory control, scheduling, payroll, is still done via 3270 greenscreens, presumably to the monstrous data center they have down in Bentonville.
W-M's an incredibly networked company, all the hardware in each store is monitored at Central Maintenance; they call us from Ar-Kansas if our cooler door is open more than a half hour, if any of the in-store systems go down they handle it remotely, the climate control is run from down there based on the external environment hour-to-hour...it's pretty amazing actually.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
That's very cute. Unfortunately your list is for supercomputers and supercomputing clusters, which in general have nothing to do with mainframes and midrange systems, used in business. Which is the topic of the article.
No one ever got modded down on Slashdot for that kind of playground bluster of course.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
"All of them were tired of being locked into the hardware that Solaris required (i.e., Sun's vertical stack), and paying Veritas Foundation Suite licensing on top of that"
In the examples you gave, couldn't it also be said that Linux is replacing Windows and AIX and what ever.Do you have any figures as to who on Wall Street replaced their systems with Linux and what were they running on before.
davecb5620@gmail.com
"they've got us wrappers for all the usual Linux commands (grep, cat, pipes, etc) so we can use them in the Windows command line. However, every single person's desktop is a WinXP with all the usual MSFT goodies"
.. :)
.. ?
I don't know of a single Windows desktop jockey that even knows what a PIPE is . OK, got the msg, only use Linux to replace UNIX and only use Windows on the DeskTop
What do you actually do that requires the use of grep, cat, pipes, etc
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Winboxen are so deeply interlaced with compliance"
.. and compliant to what exactly ? I do know that's it's very difficult for a Linux boxen to get a virus, does that count as compliance?
Isn't there a Linux boxen out there that's just as compliant
davecb5620@gmail.com
"the fact remains that a ton of those guys are wedded to Excel. Many have spent years fine tuning massive VB macros .. Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run"
..
In that case they need to be moved to a database on a server. Run all the number crunching on the server and display the results on the client. And they can still use the spreadsheet as a viewer. Come on what has the IT dept been doing up to now. It involves installing an ODBC driver on the clients. Should be a doddle on Windows
davecb5620@gmail.com
"The move isn't from Windows to Linux but from Solaris to Linux"
.. again and again and again ...
...
Yes, I got the msg, don't you dare move the client from anything except Windows, not even a diskless workstation that would save the IT honcho endlessly traveling round the orgination reinstalling, patching, reinstalling, updating the AV software
Imagine breaking a diskless workstation out a box, plugging it it - and it just works. Thing of al l the man hours saved, not to mention the cost in saleries
davecb5620@gmail.com
Actually, not quite true. If you have say... some AJAX'y stuff running on your public website, which is GPL'd, and it provides some Javascript hooks which you've modified, even though you technically aren't "giving" them away, you ARE distributing them, through the browser, to clients who request content from your ASP services.
i dont get it. what mobbing are you talking about ? i didnt notice anything particular this week
Read radical news here
here you go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The advantages of Linux over Solaris? Are you kidding?
Lets get at least one thing straight. For nearly all Solaris to Linux conversions, we're really talking at least two DISTINCT things... SPARC to x86, and Solaris to Linux.
Linux, and FFS, x86 is NOT the be-all end-all server solution. I grew to love Linux systems when I first experimented with them on my desktops years back, but more recently I've had a chance to get familiar with higher end server equipment from Sun and others, and the assholes pushing Linux/x86 into enterprise shops and displacing real UNIX servers with cheap garbage are pissing me off.
I really do not understand what is going through people's minds right now. We're stuck between replacing high end proprietary systems with tons of shitty x86 servers, tossing a high quality OS out with the hardware, and simultaneously trying to consolidate the heaps of crap x86 into more expensive, but still relatively crappy x86 servers with virtualization, running an OS that brought ZERO advantages in itself on hardware that brought ZERO advantages. All to save a buck. Spare me the ideological, free, open, use the source bullshit. I was not born yesterday, and businesses do not give a shit. The #1 reason Linux is being deployed is to save a buck. It's because the cheapest "servers" are x86, and there are no licensing costs on the OS, so it barely edges Windows out in a few shops.
What... the... f***?
I'm predicting that in the years to come, proprietary hardware will make a comeback when enterprise shops wake the F up, realizing that they are spending the same amount of money on a more complex, immature, but "open" solution. JFC, if I am wrong, I am not sticking around in this line of business to maintain disposable servers. What kind of future IT environment are you setting yourselves up for? Linux advocates, please wake up, and look where this is going. Take some IT history classes, look what you're leaving behind. You all think you're going to get a cookie for saving your employer a buck? The "IT professional" is doomed.
The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family...
Ok I see it now. I thought the two different charts were supposed to be for different tyme periods, I would have liked to see what the growth of Linux was in the financial sector.
The bottom pie is different because it represents the operating system family's share of processing power. Here you'll note the Windows systems have disappeared entirely
Yea I see, while Windows has disappeared Linux has shrunk. And mixed increased.
Since you're making the observation that the data is seven months old, are you anticipating some upswell in adoption of Windows among the HPC crowd
I'm not anticipating much at this point, except that there will be more support for OSes other than Windows, say Linux and OS X. For instance it used to be day traders had to use Windows because there wasn't much if any software for any other OS, Solaris maybe, but software can now be found for OS X and I heard some is appearing for Linux.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Ask "most users" how to make a DVD on your mac that just plays in a loop and they'll be dumbfounded, because it's not obvious (well, it wasn't in the idvd in 10.4... times may have changed, sorry) and users are allergic to help files.
I don't know how to make a DVD either, except maybe to drag and drop. I haven't needed to it yet but I can look it up. Right now though I am copying documents to an external HDD as a backup.
Major refinements to gnome-app-install and the inclusion of the new network manager would do a lot of what is wrong, though. Hopefully that stuff will come in Intrepid.
Check out CNR, Click N Run. They have an app, compatible with Ubunutu, that allows software to be installed by simply clicking and running. It can also update software or uninstall it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Actually, he's right. Low latency doesn't necessarily mean real-time. Real-time (or "Hard" Real-time) means knowing exactly how many clock-cycles a particular task will take so that it can be coordinated with another real-time device.
But, for some applications, real-time means that a transaction will happen "now" and not several seconds later.
"Have you tried installing IE 6 in Wine?"
The Legend of Monkey Boy's Drunken Master....
Jackie Chan would be impress....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"