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

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

They don't hire their High Frequency Trading software people from ads. Personal recommendations, more likely.  The ads for Java coders are for run of the mill back end banking stuff. Most banks are doing their enterprise scale work in Java (which is replacing PowerBuilder, RPG, and COBOL).  Or Java interfaces to a SQL backend.

I don't know of any million dollar FPGAs.  Even space qualified big Xilinx parts are about a tenth of that.

Modern FPGAs could do substantially better than 1 microsecond latency.  They have multiGbps interfaces on chip (e.g. Rocket I/O) and external clocks in the hundreds of MHz range.  Now, if you're doing store and forward routing of 1000 bit packets on a 1Gbps wire, of course you're going to have 1 microsecond latency.


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Vincent Diepeveen
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:26 AM
To: Eugen Leitl
Cc: tt at postbiota.org; Beowulf Mailing List; forkit!
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Pricing and Trading Networks: Down is Up, Left is Right

Yes very good article.

1) 
But now the weirdest thing - i offered myself at different spots to write a < 1 microsecond software to parse that marketdata, but no one wants to hire you it seems - they just look for JAVA coders.

Example is also Morgan Chase. All their job offers, which i receive daily, 99% is JAVA jobs.

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Java is of course TOO SLOW for working with trading data. Much better is C/C++ and assembler after you already have achieved that < 1 microseconds in C.

Note that the 'FPGA'S" that are advertized costs millions most of them and the only latency quote i saw there is 2 microseconds, which also sounds a bit slow to me, but well.