Western civilization runs on the mainframe

Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe by rbranson on Monday August 02, 2010 @02:05PM (#1568437)

1) I refuse to believe banks and insurance companies have I/O that can't be satiated by commodity hardware. InfiniBand QDR can transfer 40Gbit/sec with 1µsec latency. That's easily 200,000 synchronous round-trip messages per second PER link. If you can deal with higher latency, those can be aggregated and you can easily exchange tens of millions per second. Let's take this one step further: ECNs and automated trading systems. Their latency and I/O requirements make banks look like amateurs, yet they almost entirely run on off-the-shelf hardware and systems. Billions are at stake in these systems.

2) When was the last time Google or Amazon or NASDAQ or Arca was actually out of service because of hardware failure or maintenance?

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Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe by gaius on Monday August 02, 2010 @02:42PM (#1568562)

You have to compare like with like. A tickstream is more like writing to an in-memory ring buffer than it is to a database. Or a tick is like a UDP packet compared to an X400 email. Even the ECNs run their backoffices on mainframes.

I would be willing to bet that Amazon do their warehouse and logistics operations on a mainframe too.

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Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe by rbranson on Monday August 02, 2010 @04:46PM (#1569002)

ECNs do trade matching, which is very similar to bank transactions in that it requires synchronized, transactional processing. You've got huge lists of bids and asks that are matched as quickly as possible. I know engineers who work(ed) on Archipelago, now known as NYSE Arca. It's UNIX-based, first Sun and now Linux. There are no mainframes at all. These aren't particularly impressive boxes or a ton of them either. The software is fast and well architected.

NYSE also apparently unplugged their last mainframe in 2008[1]. It appears NASDAQ OMX's INET trading platform is based on x86-64/Linux/Oracle stack on commodity hardware[2]. NASDAQ's US exchange has a record of 194,205 orders per second[3]. The latest VisaNet peak message rate I could find was from 2008 and was 8,442 transactions per second[4]. Based on the fact that Visa aggregates transactions over hundreds of major banks, I would guess that each individual bank processes less credit card transactions. Visa's 2009 volume was 9.0 billion transactions[5]. I couldn't find anything substantial on NASDAQ's stock market order volume, but NASDAQ does about 10 billion contracts/year JUST in US & European option derivatives[6].

[1] http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142...

[2] http://www.nasdaqomx.com/digitalAssets/66/66992_genium_inet....

[3] http://www.nasdaqomxtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet

[4] http://investor.visa.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=215693&p=irol-n...

[5] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-indu...

[6] http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/company-news-story.aspx?storyid=2...

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Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe by d2viant on Monday August 02, 2010 @03:54PM (#1568821)

Amazon did run a mainframe briefly, but apparently it didn't last more than a year.

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2008/05/am...

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Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe by mmt on Monday August 02, 2010 @09:35PM (#1569773)

Amazon is beyond enterprise scale, it's Web scale.

This stark distinction in order of magnitude of scale is why there may be so much incredulity here as to the technical superiority of mainframes.

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Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe by ximeng on Monday August 02, 2010 @07:11PM (#1569460)

LSE went down last year if that helps for (2):

http://blogs.computerworld.com/14876/london_stock_exchange_d...

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