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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."

4 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. NASDAQ uses Gentoo? by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh dear god our economy is a whole lot more fragile than I ever imagined. Brings a new meaning to "emerge world".

  2. thanks for whoring quants by decora · · Score: 5, Insightful

    lets just ignore the fact that the Great Recession was directly enabled by the PHDs who turned their eyes askance at what the Gaussian Copula Function code was being used for. Not your problem right? You just make a tool, not your responsibility how others use it.

    you had five kids to feed.

  3. Oh, Linux, how you've forsaken us by RobinEggs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the very last place I like seeing Linux.

    The article is saying (obviously) that Linux is the chosen platform for high-frequency trading, i.e. algorithm-dominated trading that has everything to do with manipulating and responding to the market in nanosecond time frames for a quick buck and nothing to do with making stable, long-term investment decisions.

    I'd rather see evidence of a Linux machine in Hitler's bunker than hear about Linux helping Wall Street punks get even further from real, useful activities than they used to be.

  4. Set the exchanges to a clock. by inhuman_4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This high frequency trading is stupid. Everyone knows that it is a scam that is just making the markets more unstable. Yet no one does anything about it. IMHO the markets should have a clock speed like a CPU. All of the trades enter a queue and the queue gets executed once a second. This would limit each trading day to X number of ticks per day. This would go a long way to removing high frequency crap from the system. Of course people will then try to improve short term predictions rather than long term like they should. But it would be a step in the right direction.