Operating System Choice

MRBRETTONWOODS · May 19, 2014

volpunter said:
This post is such a heap of crap

NASDAQ runs on Linux:

http://www.risk.net/risk-magazine/feature/2318888/trading-technology-product-of-the-year-nasdaq-omx

"As an operator of exchanges itself â and user of its own technology â Nasdaq OMX was acutely aware of the growing need for markets to cut costs. The company wanted to take advantage of advances in low-cost hardware, so it developed the new system to run on the Linux open-source operating system and off-the-shelf commodity processors. This is cited as one of the big attractions of the service by HKEx and other users.
"

http://www.nasdaqomx.com/digitalAssets/82/82650_geniuminettradingfs.pdf

"Seamlessly integrates to Genium INET Clearing and can easily be
integrated with any other system. Genium INET Trading and Clearing
share the same database and operational tools so it is more efficient
and less costly to maintain than separate platforms. Built on a
low cost LINUX platform and run on a low maintenance commodity
hardware base, Genium INET is highly cost efficient to test, deploy,
maintain and upgrade. Genium INET Trading supports multiple markets
simultaneously on a single platform â including all trading from
traditional cash and fixed income securities, derivatives, commodities
and energy contracts. The platform supports any standard instrument
as well as tailor made derivatives and combination strategies."

HW/processor: Intel x86, 64 bit architecture
+ O/S: Linux
+ Database: Oracle or PostgreSQL
+ Network: Gigabit capacity or better
+ Built to scale up and out

eusdaiki · May 19, 2014

Volpunter, do you have a source about that nsdq matching engine?

vicirek · May 20, 2014

volpunter said:
This post is such a heap of crap, you linger in the Genetic Programming thread and equally show very little to no fact based knowledge.

I am happy Windows 7/8 user and program in Visual Studio Pro 2013 among others and yes I have Linux box as well used for certain tasks.

Open Source is much wider term than just OS and can target multiple platforms - this is what I am referring to not to Linux/Unix itself.

However as you noted Windows is dominant in desktop/laptop but is only about 35% server (not 50%) and not existent in Mobile which means that Linux/Unix is dominant OS. I also think that Windows deserves a little bit more credit for its capabilities and many issues were caused by hardware/firmware problems rather than OS itself. If someone needs browsing, email and few more simple tasks then free Linux alternative is good but for anything more it comes with more trouble than it is worth so staying with Windows is good choice.

I was caught myself off guard with what is happening in Open Source space aside from OS but I have to admit that some Linux distros are impressive in terms of UI and ease of use.

So what is it that is a threat to MS from open source? First things that can leverage HTML5 and JavaScript for example jquery, angularjs, nodejs, backbonejs, expressjs and scores of others are threatening MS in web front end and back end. Note that IE is marginalized by Chrome and FireFox. MongoDb and entire big data revolution with Hadoop in front and search engines on top of it go after their database business. Servers are run using mostly non-Windows frameworks but recently seems like Azure is gaining a little bit there so the game is not over yet for Microsoft.

If you look at Visual Studio MS resigned to this fact and what they do? Embrace open source community! Now I can use Python (open source) right from VS, they started working on Hadoop extensions, you can use HTML5, JS together with installed open source add-ons directly from VS IDE.

The problem for MS is that they cannot monopolize and monetize open source because by focusing on Mobile they are slowly killing their leverage in desktop OS and even before that lost the browser wars.

How much of it is being used and by whom? It is used not only by small business and individuals but by major corporations to run apps, networking, security, servers, data etc. to the tune of 50% to 60% of software currently in use.

This trend is fueled by developers transitioning away from targeting single platform by moving to projects that do not dependent on Microsoft technologies because they were burnt by them so many times.

Why?

For the past few years Windows developers cannot get clear answer what is the future programming model because MS abandons projects far too often irritating developer base (started back with vb6, now silverlight, widows forms and even future of wpf and .net was in question for a while). It forces refactoring or code simply does not work or scale well. MS tendency was to create huge frameworks unusable in today's mobile world by using too much resources and not scaling well across devices including servers.

And the bottom line is future Windows OS - will it be cloud OS, how many tiers of licensing and at what cost to be able to run fully featured Windows OS.

Most importantly Microsoft is moving to closed programming model like they did with Win8 Metro UI requiring paid side loading licence (about $30 in lots of 100) in order for me to install my own program on grandma computer just to impress her.

Because of that it does not look very promising for Windows and it is time to look for alternatives just in case.

volpunter · May 20, 2014

yes, but you can simply google it. I even conceded that some criticized Windows for being the culprit of the most recent Nasdaq outages which is of course the same BS than those at the Tokyo Stock Exchange saving their asses by saying that their trading halts were to be blamed on the new Linux platform.

eusdaiki said:
Volpunter, do you have a source about that nsdq matching engine?

volpunter · May 20, 2014

a) your first link does not work,
b) Genium is a different Nasdaq project to my knowledge, the central matching engine of Nasdaq still runs on Windows servers, at least that is what I hear. (At the very least it has been running on Windows servers for a long time until recently, and again, I think it still does.) And I repeat again that this was only to provide factual evidence that Windows server for years has been the underlying technology for years in matching many hundreds of millions of trades a day.

MRBRETTONWOODS said:
NASDAQ runs on Linux:

http://www.risk.net/risk-magazine/feature/2318888/trading-technology-product-of-the-year-nasdaq-omx

"As an operator of exchanges itself â and user of its own technology â Nasdaq OMX was acutely aware of the growing need for markets to cut costs. The company wanted to take advantage of advances in low-cost hardware, so it developed the new system to run on the Linux open-source operating system and off-the-shelf commodity processors. This is cited as one of the big attractions of the service by HKEx and other users.
"

http://www.nasdaqomx.com/digitalAssets/82/82650_geniuminettradingfs.pdf

"Seamlessly integrates to Genium INET Clearing and can easily be
integrated with any other system. Genium INET Trading and Clearing
share the same database and operational tools so it is more efficient
and less costly to maintain than separate platforms. Built on a
low cost LINUX platform and run on a low maintenance commodity
hardware base, Genium INET is highly cost efficient to test, deploy,
maintain and upgrade. Genium INET Trading supports multiple markets
simultaneously on a single platform â including all trading from
traditional cash and fixed income securities, derivatives, commodities
and energy contracts. The platform supports any standard instrument
as well as tailor made derivatives and combination strategies."

HW/processor: Intel x86, 64 bit architecture
+ O/S: Linux
+ Database: Oracle or PostgreSQL
+ Network: Gigabit capacity or better
+ Built to scale up and out

volpunter · May 20, 2014

lol, I already assumed you totally missed the topic of this thread, at least you also admit that now. Maybe you wanna open a new thread re open source software or projects as this is about Operating Systems.
Please learn to read: 50%+ of all sold servers were Windows based servers. 30-35% of servers in public domain are running Linux another 30-35% Windows OSs, again splitting the server market about in half between Linux and Windows. Basic research and data aggregation is really not that hard.

Ha, and why do you have an issue with the fact that Microsoft embraces open-source projects and technologies. You want to hold that against them? So has Apple. So did IBM, so did Oracle. Whats your problem with that? That is supposed to be MS's admission that their OS and technology stack is shit? I am not sure I understand what your point at this juncture.

And let me tell you something what I hear why a lot of corporations still want their IT teams to utilize .Net technologies. A lot of the open-source technologies and concepts are very promising but a) not fully proven yet because they did not exist long enough, but b) more importantly, with a lot of the open-source technologies you need to patch uncountable libraries and concepts together to get a working prototype. If you build on top of .Net you get a lot out of the box, a professional IDE, multiple languages that seamlessly integrate with other languages (be it OOP languages or web scripting languages), languages that are hugely supported by the wider community, a GUI language and huge user community (WPF and Silverlight), various database connectivity out of the box, among many others.
I am not down-talking some of the fantastic open-source technology which I also peruse, I am saying many corporations have a solid reason why to partner with Microsoft for many years to come.

vicirek said:
I am happy Windows 7/8 user and program in Visual Studio Pro 2013 among others and yes I have Linux box as well used for certain tasks.

Open Source is much wider term than just OS and can target multiple platforms - this is what I am referring to not to Linux/Unix itself.

However as you noted Windows is dominant in desktop/laptop but is only about 35% server (not 50%) and not existent in Mobile which means that Linux/Unix is dominant OS. I also think that Windows deserves a little bit more credit for its capabilities and many issues were caused by hardware/firmware problems rather than OS itself. If someone needs browsing, email and few more simple tasks then free Linux alternative is good but for anything more it comes with more trouble than it is worth so staying with Windows is good choice.

I was caught myself off guard with what is happening in Open Source space aside from OS but I have to admit that some Linux distros are impressive in terms of UI and ease of use.

So what is it that is a threat to MS from open source? First things that can leverage HTML5 and JavaScript for example jquery, angularjs, nodejs, backbonejs, expressjs and scores of others are threatening MS in web front end and back end. Note that IE is marginalized by Chrome and FireFox. MongoDb and entire big data revolution with Hadoop in front and search engines on top of it go after their database business. Servers are run using mostly non-Windows frameworks but recently seems like Azure is gaining a little bit there so the game is not over yet for Microsoft.

If you look at Visual Studio MS resigned to this fact and what they do? Embrace open source community! Now I can use Python (open source) right from VS, they started working on Hadoop extensions, you can use HTML5, JS together with installed open source add-ons directly from VS IDE.

The problem for MS is that they cannot monopolize and monetize open source because by focusing on Mobile they are slowly killing their leverage in desktop OS and even before that lost the browser wars.

How much of it is being used and by whom? It is used not only by small business and individuals but by major corporations to run apps, networking, security, servers, data etc. to the tune of 50% to 60% of software currently in use.

This trend is fueled by developers transitioning away from targeting single platform by moving to projects that do not dependent on Microsoft technologies because they were burnt by them so many times.

Why?

For the past few years Windows developers cannot get clear answer what is the future programming model because MS abandons projects far too often irritating developer base (started back with vb6, now silverlight, widows forms and even future of wpf and .net was in question for a while). It forces refactoring or code simply does not work or scale well. MS tendency was to create huge frameworks unusable in today's mobile world by using too much resources and not scaling well across devices including servers.

And the bottom line is future Windows OS - will it be cloud OS, how many tiers of licensing and at what cost to be able to run fully featured Windows OS.

Most importantly Microsoft is moving to closed programming model like they did with Win8 Metro UI requiring paid side loading licence (about $30 in lots of 100) in order for me to install my own program on grandma computer just to impress her.

Because of that it does not look very promising for Windows and it is time to look for alternatives just in case.

aqtrader · May 20, 2014

I use MS Windows as the front-end because my brokerage firm only supports Windows not Linux. I use Linux for all other activities in trading, backtesting, statistics, filtering, reporting, etc.
For serious guys doing a lot of heaving coding, scripting, code optimization, high-performance computing, data mining, etc, there is no other choice but Linux + other open source software coming together with a typical Linux distro.

Craig66 · May 20, 2014

aqtrader said:
For serious guys doing a lot of heaving coding, scripting, code optimization, high-performance computing, data mining, etc, there is no other choice but Linux + other open source software coming together with a typical Linux distro.

Why can't these things be done on Windows?

aqtrader · May 20, 2014

Craig66 said:
Why can't these things be done on Windows?

It is because MS is proprietary and cannot do all the things the tech/science world need. If you look at Top500 Supercomputers, almost all of them are based on Linux, or BSD or Unix. If you are doing code optimization, the best optimizing compilers for you to use is probably only open source like gcc, or llvm or open64. You may run these tools on Windows under a layer of simulation layer, for example, under Cygwin, but the performance and features are very bad.

MRBRETTONWOODS · May 20, 2014

volpunter said:
a) your first link does not work,
b) Genium is a different Nasdaq project to my knowledge, the central matching engine of Nasdaq still runs on Windows servers, at least that is what I hear. (At the very least it has been running on Windows servers for a long time until recently, and again, I think it still does.) And I repeat again that this was only to provide factual evidence that Windows server for years has been the underlying technology for years in matching many hundreds of millions of trades a day.

You're clearly living behind the times, I'm not aware what NASDAQ's matching engine was 10 years ago (there's no proof it was windows though), but 9 years ago it acquired instinet (based on linux) and dumped whatever it had of its own legacy platform to switch to instinet's platform.
It uses INET now and windows isn't mentioned at all anywhere by NASDAQ itself:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/101316/Nasdaq_to_Adopt_Instinet_s_Engine

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/sof...tre-concerns-rife-following-fresh-nasdaq-bid/

The main point is that there are no modern exchanges using windows anymore, because of scalability issues.