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

[Joe Landman]

On 02/18/2012 12:30 PM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
> On Feb 18, 2012, at 6:02 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
>
>> On 02/18/2012 11:12 AM, Andrew Piskorski wrote:
>>
>>> You've worked in the financial trading world so long and have talked
>>> with so many different (successful) traders, that a guess based on
>>> your own experience might well be reasonable? Oh wait, you've never
>>> done anything remotely like that.
>>
>> FWIW: our customers in this market all say the same thing in terms of
>> "Time To Market" and correctness/maintainability. It sucks if your code
>> is write once. Its bad if it takes you N months to deploy something
>> that a competitor can deploy in N weeks (or N days).
>
> Say you produce a cpu now within 2 weeks. it's 200 watt. it's 1 gflop
> and it's $100 production price
> including R&D overhead, including everything except shipping to customers.
>
> Good idea to sell?

... from which I take it you didn't comprehend Joachim's point.

Time to market is a way to say how quickly a code or computing platform 
(software side) can be put into production.  At least this is what we 
are told.

Time to market has *nothing* whatsoever to do with what you are talking 
about in this context.  Others feel free to jump in and 
correct/dispute/etc. this.

>
> time to market matters for simple software engineering - not for stuff
> that has to perform ok?

See above.

[...]

> Yeah i bet some dudes want to know at which age i wrote my first
> mortgage calculator
> and and at which age i wrote my first trading application - but i won't.
>
> Had you read what i posted - which you obviously never do - it would be
> pretty obvious to you i had.

Hmmm ... I used to read what you wrote (note the past tense) though I 
skim it for ... er ... nuggets ... these days.

>
> Also shows how total ignorant you are about performance. but let me ask
> you next 3 questions:

I.

am.

ignorant.

about.

performance.

This is either the most insulting or amusing thing I've read in a really 
long time.  Years.

I'll take it as amusing.

Yes Vincent.  We, who push our gear that hits more than 5 GB/s sustained 
to and from spinning rust, in a single box, with less than 50 disks 
required to get there ... we who push our flash arrays and SSD arrays 
that hit millions of IOPs ...

Yes Vincent, we are ignorant of performance.  We obviously don't get or 
understand performance.  We have no interest in it.

(the preceding should be read aloud with a voice positively dripping in 
sarcasm)

I am laughing now.  No, really.  Thats laughter you hear.

>
> a) when are you gonna buy a bulldozer cpu from your own cash? If so why?
> And if not why not?

I bought (with my own cash) Opteron and Xeon.  Clearspeed, FGPAs, GPUS etc.

And you?

Won't buy bulldozer for us for a while.  Looks like it needs some 
performance tweaks, and the compilers have to do a better job for it.

> b) you drink of course a cola from a local supermarket isn't it, so no
> pepsi nor coca cola - price matters most isn't it?

Er ... I don't drink soda (sound of an opaque metaphor shattering).

> expensive wines? Time to market huh?

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 ...



> c) in 2003 AMD was first to market a x64 cpu, intel following with core2
> some years later. Did you buy this yourself or advice others to buy it?
> - i bet like everyone on this list you get daily requests on what to buy
> isn't it, so be honest
> - what did you advice in 2003 and 2004 to those surrounding you?

Oh. My.

Vincent ... um ...

How do I say this ...

Why don't you google me, with the phrase  ... I dunno ... "AMD 
whitepaper opteron" or similar things.  Here's one you might find: 
http://developer.amd.com/assets/Computational_Chemistry_Paper.pdf

I can send you others in PDF form if you like.

If you read some of the white papers we wrote for them, you might even 
find where they got the APU expression from ...

Heh.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
        http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
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cell : +1 734 612 4615