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How Linux Mastered Wall Street

Posted by Soulskill on from the penguins-in-charge dept.

itwbennett writes "Linux has become a dominant player in finance thanks to its ability to pass messages very quickly, said Linux kernel contributor Christoph Lameter. 'The trading shops saw that the lowest-latency solutions would only be possible with Linux,' Lameter said. 'The older Unixes couldn't move as fast as Linux did.' One key attribute was the TCP/IP stack, the configuration of which determines how fast a message can be passed between two systems. Linux also offers financial firms the ability to modify the source code to further speed performance. 'It depends on how daring the exchange is,' he said, noting that NASDAQ uses a modified version of the Gentoo Linux distribution. Lameter will discuss how Linux became widely adopted by financial exchanges at the LinuxCon conference in Vancouver this week."

3 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. I dont care of WallStreet likes linux by FudRucker · · Score: 3, Informative

    I still wont trust WallStreet with my money, which would be about like trusting an alcoholic with the beer at a party...

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  2. Accuracy ? by Alain+Williams · · Score: 3, Informative

    As late as 2007, Wall Street exchanges were still largely run on Unix, such as HP's AIX and Sun Microsystems' Solaris

    I don't think that IBM will be pleased to be told that HP produced AIX!

  3. Yes, we are heavily linux by proud+american · · Score: 4, Informative

    I work at a major wall street bank. We used to be heavily Sparc/Solaris/C++. Over time the Intel platforms became much faster and much cheaper than the Sparc ones. There was some early concerns about reliability but it was not warranted. The boxes are so fast now we are almost exclusively using virtual linux boxes too.

    We are doing a lot of Java these days. The JVM's are much improved. It is very easy to write large heavily multithreaded Java apps to replace the our large C++ distributed systems. The Java development, build, debug, and deployment tools are great.

    One can spend time arguing the merits of C++ vs Java. The reality is in most cases the C++ development time is slower, and the coding patterns used do not produce code that is faster than Java. C++ development and deployment across different platforms is a pain.