NYSE Goes To Linux

Aligrip writes "It appears that IBM has convinced the folks at the Securities Industry Automation Corp (SIAC) to move their entire trading network to Linux as explained in this article in the Investors Business Daily. The authors predict that this deal could give Linux "a hot new beachhead with financial institutions". Cool!"

Here's a nit to pick

[agutier]

Will Linux be Wall Street's next killer app?

Isn't it the other way around?

Re:Not bad, but not as big as one might think.

[regen]

I would speculate they weren't running NT before if it was that easy to port their software over. So this takes a chunk out of the proprietary Unix market, sure, but if we were to consider this a Zero Sum game, Unix loses, Linux gains, Microsoft doesn't change a thing.

I was the network engineer for the artmail project. The orignal version of artmail was running on a Sun Ultra 5 and Solaris. It didn't take more that a few days for a summer intern to actually write the artmail application. The whole project had a very small budget, the machine was a extra order for a different project and the network was sort of tacked onto another network.

The actual push for Linux on the SDC (Shared Data Center) mainframe (not the NYSE mainframe, it is not an IBM) came from the Network System Engineer in the mainframe group.

He had set up an LPAR running Linux about a year and a half ago, so that he could server test pages from Apache.

The SDC is primarily used by NSCC, National Security Clearing Corp and a few applications from NYSE, but the NYSE trading system are running on Tandem systems. Only one NYSE application involving option trading is actually run on IBM mainframes.

Re:I hope...

[SLiK812]

Unfortunately this has nothign to do with traders, as SIAC handles nothing on the actual floors of either NYSE or AMEX. Almost all traders on the floor don't even use PCs. People at posts (specialists) use PCs, and its usually windows with Excel. Traders use scientific calculators with the Black-Scholles model stored as a formula, or a hand-held PC given to them by their brokerage house.

SIAC is all back-end: allocation of money and clearing of the transaction. Your right in the fact that traders would never hack a script together, but they probably would never know how to do it in the first place. I've learned that in most cases traders hate coding, and coders hate trading.

I work for a Broker/Dealer, so I know a little about the markets.