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SGI forges overclocked servers for Wall Street
The Register ^ | 17th December 2010 21:49 GMT | Timothy Prickett Morgan

Posted on 12/18/2010 11:49:18 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach

Silicon Graphics has a need for speed. Or, more precisely, some of its customers do, and those customers also have money to burn.

Supercomputer maker Appro International launched its HF1 overclocked server for hedge funds and other financial firms back in October, and now SGI is jumping into the game with a special Rackable half-depth rack server that has overclocked processors.

For a lot of workloads, particularly with financial trading, the aggregate capacity of a multi-core processor is not nearly as important as the clock speed. With clock speeds in the x64 world more or less stuck at about 3 GHz because of the logarithmic nature of the laws of thermodynamics - each small increase in clock speed yields an ever-increasing bump in power consumption and heat dissipation - financial trading companies and the stock, bond, commodity, and other exchanges that get hammered by them all day and night have not been able to goose performance the way they could in the old days before Moore's Law hit the 3 GHz speed limit on the x64 architecture.

To get an edge on their rivals, some financial companies are turning to overclocking CPUs to get that extra edge, and are willing to literally burn up those CPUs in a matter of months to get the edge to make their money.

SGI is testing the waters with a commercial overclocked server offering, and is starting out with just one machine from its Rackable half-depth server lineup. The Rackable 1000 series machines are 1U boxes sporting either Xeon processors from Intel or Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, while the Rackable 2000 series are 2U boxes with the same CPU options.

(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: highfrequencytrading; hitech

1 posted on 12/18/2010 11:49:21 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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To: ShadowAce
Someone besides gamers want overclocked systems.

And:

*************************************EXCERPT******************************************

Mannel says that all of the financial services firms that SGI is selling iron,... use Linux, and CentOS tends to be popular. ®

2 posted on 12/18/2010 11:51:25 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

SGI is still in buisness? Who knew?

Whatever became of their MIPS RISC processor line?
They were pretty hot back in the day.


3 posted on 12/18/2010 11:52:08 AM PST by rahbert
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Used by high frequency traders, dark pools and hedge funds to front run your online brokerage trades.


4 posted on 12/18/2010 12:00:23 PM PST by Frantzie
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To: rahbert

Oddly MIPS Technologies has been a very hot stock this year.


5 posted on 12/18/2010 12:04:22 PM PST by Frantzie
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
They need super fast computers to keep up with the High Frequency Trading.
6 posted on 12/18/2010 12:11:47 PM PST by smokingfrog (Do all the talking you want, but do what I tell you.)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Moving capital faster than the speed of light pays off:

Relativistic Trading
The speed of light isn’t fast enough for some market transactions.

http://www.insidescience.org/policy/relativistic-trading

Relativistic statistical arbitrage

Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have made light propagation delays between geographically separated exchanges relevant. Here we show that there exist optimal locations from which to coordinate the statistical arbitrage of pairs of spacelike separated securities, and calculate a representative map of such locations on Earth. Furthermore, trading local securities along chains of such intermediate locations results in a novel econophysical effect, in which the relativistic propagation of tradable information is effectively slowed or stopped by arbitrage.

http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v82/i5/e056104


7 posted on 12/18/2010 12:37:59 PM PST by epithermal
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To: epithermal

So they are trying to make money fly...

=8-p


8 posted on 12/18/2010 1:15:24 PM PST by =8 mrrabbit 8=
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

If they are going to do it commercially why not really crank them and use water cooling rather the blowing them out in a few months?


9 posted on 12/18/2010 1:37:38 PM PST by VeniVidiVici (Barack Obama = The Captain Norman Dike of presidents)
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To: VeniVidiVici

Just a guess, being recently retired from 30 years in field service. The commoditization (sp?) of the field service rep is in parallel with the standardization of server hardware. You’re just not going to allow a $12/hour jr. tech into your data center to work on leaking plumbing. There will be machines above and below the affected unit to consider. The push seems to be to incorporate modular liquid cooling into the data center at the rack level and to have certified hvac people perform the maintenance.


10 posted on 12/18/2010 2:43:18 PM PST by printhead
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To: rdb3; Calvinist_Dark_Lord; GodGunsandGuts; CyberCowboy777; Salo; Bobsat; JosephW; ...

11 posted on 12/18/2010 2:58:18 PM PST by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: Frantzie

You mean like the GOLDMAN SACS??


12 posted on 12/18/2010 3:03:33 PM PST by Dick Bachert
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