Hardware requirements [LWN.net]

Hardware requirements

Posted May 16, 2008 8:17 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Instead of running on proprietary hardware, the exchange, now known as NYSE Euronext, runs on 200 four-way HP ProLiant DL585 servers and 400 ProLiant BL 685c blade servers.

600 servers? What on earth are they doing? I thought a stock exchange was a pretty simple business.

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Hardware requirements

Posted May 16, 2008 12:45 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

600 servers? What on earth are they doing? I thought a stock exchange was a pretty simple business.

I guess that while each transaction is simple, there are lots of them happening simultaneously on a very large stock exchange like NYSE. And maybe the code handling is written in Java with all buzzword-compliant middleware...

Hardware requirements

Posted May 16, 2008 21:09 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Let us see... In their latest report, they acknowledge handling 4 thousand millions (that is US billions) shares per day just in "NYSE listed issues", and maybe twice that overall. Despite being called "NYSE Euronext transactions" I don't find transaction data reported too clearly; however we may assume that each transaction handles an average of 10 shares each way, as the "TRF" figure seems to imply: 230 millions of that every day. Again, twice that might be the global transaction figure.

So very approximately we might have about 4*10^8 transactions every day. Assuming they are distributed evenly during the day we would have about 5k operations per second. If you can get 100 transactions per second out of a server (not a bad record for a database) then just about 50 machines will do. Also you would probably have separated database and back-end layers, with about half the machines for each group -- for a total of 100 servers. But the load is characteristically not evenly distributed; with two overlapping cycles of 8 hours each, the number should at least triple up. Add a security factor of 2, and there you have it: 600 servers.

Within the bounds of such a gross estimation, 600 servers sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Hardware requirements

Posted May 20, 2008 13:12 UTC (Tue) by sean.hunter (subscriber, #7920) [Link]

Lots of market participants run algorithmic trading strategies where low latency exchange
connections are extremely important.  They pay the exchange to have dedicated hardware at the
exchange.