[Beowulf] Pricing and Trading Networks: Down is Up, Left is Right

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On Feb 18, 2012, at 7:26 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
>
> Ahh ... an obtuse path to discuss time to market as a function of  
> cost.
>
> So if your development cost requires you pay expensive programmers  
> for 6 months working on very expensive hardware with very expensive  
> tools for an application that will have a usable lifetime of 3-6  
> months (or whatever window is relevant) ...
>
> ... versus ...
>
> you pay your very expensive programmers for 1-2 weeks working on  
> less expensive hardware with well designed and inexpensive tools  
> for an application that will have a usable lifetime of 3-6 months  
> (or whatever window is relevant)
>
> ...  which of these will
>
> a) cost less to build/test/deploy
> b) have a longer time in market to make you money?
>
>
> And your expensive programmers get to work on the next task,  
> therefore increasing your ability to have a collection of tools  
> actively engaged on the market.
>
> Seriously, if you don't get why this matters, well ...
>

Why is quadrics bankrupt?
Why has everyone forgotten about myri as high performance network?
Why is itanium end of line?

Simple - they don't perform well and/or were too expensive.

In all your naivity you forgot the most important thing; PERFORMANCE  
and RELIABILITY.

Your fast $2.50 an hour software engineers are
a) not producing reliable code
b) no performance

both crucial for trading software.

The entire discussion here and the entire mailing list is interested  
in reliability and performance.

They care about the big clusters the traders have in their backyard  
that do all the calculations - and i can't say anything
sensible there either except that there is A FEW hedgefunds that  
publicly admit they do have big clusters with highend networks
and reliable ones and we do know it's all in big bunkers - so we can  
be sure that no one, especially the government, doesn't know
what happens there.

So that's why we aren't discussing the most interesting stuff they  
got. From just 1 hedgefund we know they have a couple of thousands of  
nodes;
that's a rather big one though. The rest we can just guess.

What we can discuss is the highperformance part which is the trading  
engine. Either in fpga or in software or a hybrid.

Now you're telling that 'time to market' matters there?

What world are you from. THIS IS ABOUT PERFORMANCE.
if you can't deliver the performance, you don't even need to START  
the project.

I really doubt you know anything about selling a performance product  
if all you care about it time to market :)

Vincent