Some folks have written me saying that The Cloud does not have application in the Trading Industry because of latency issues.
Some of you may already be familiar with my thoughts on The Latency Hype so I won't delve into them here.
For this blog post, let's put Trade Execution Services within The Cloud aside for the time being and focus solely on the R&D side of your trading business.
The Cloud harmonizes the intrinsic elasticity of the Demand for Processing Cycles with the inelasticity of the Supply of Processing Cycles
One of the great advantages of The Cloud is that you can ramp up processing power without having to provision and/or commit to servers. Once you are done with your calculations you release your leased processing cycles back into the pool of The Cloud and forget about them.
All of the hardware, software, rack space, electricity, etc. that it took to run your calculations are now offered on a pay-as-you-go model via The Cloud.
Gone are the days of provisioning your data processing resources for your projected peak load.
With The Cloud's real-time scalable pay-as-you-go model you can spin up 1,000 servers and run them for an hour for the same cost as spinning up 1 server and running it for 1,000 hours.
How cool is that?
...and the cycle time is cheap. Below are cycle costs from Amazon's Web Offering (EC2):
|
Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances |
||
|
Standard
On-Demand Instances |
Linux/UNIX Usage |
Windows Usage |
|
Small (Default) |
$0.10 per hour |
$0.125 per hour |
|
Large |
$0.40 per hour |
$0.50 per hour |
|
Extra Large |
$0.80 per hour |
$1.00 per hour |
|
High CPU
On-Demand Instances |
Linux/UNIX Usage |
Windows Usage |
|
Medium |
$0.20 per hour |
$0.30 per hour |
|
Extra Large |
$0.80 per hour |
$1.20 per hour |
Note - we are Vendor Neutral and are only quoting Amazon's pricing as an example, not an endorsement.
There are different types of Cloud offerings and depending upon the type of number crunching that you do, or would like to do, and the composure of your current Intellectual Property code base, Amazon may not be the best offering for you.
In our next post about Algo and Quant Trading in The Cloud, Tim Kraska will document a Logical Design for Cloud Services that will enable you to port your current IP to The Cloud.
Yes, I concur.
You have nailed it.
The Cloud will offer up whole new areas of ideas to investigate now that massive processing power is soon at everyone's fingertips.
"Cloud computing" used to be called "time sharing" way back in the Bad Old Days of computing when there were many fiefdoms (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell--these were called "The BUNCH", and of course, "Big Blue", IBM).
Cloud computing = time sharing + parallel execution and as such is a step forward in terms of computability and power.
The benefit of the Cloud, per Mr. Weiss' insight, is that one may develop an app on a local server, debug it, and then run it on a Cloud server and achieve excellent economies of scale in terms of time savings and throughput.
i have followed the links from the 4th entry in the "to trade in the cloud" series back to the third and from the third to the second.
The second entry doesnt have a link to the first
Can you send a link to the first entry?
http://www.transactionlevelanalysis.com/2009/04/dude-youre-getting-the-cloud-1.html
The first post did not have an explicit 'Series' tag... apologies for any confusion.
Thanks for following this.
http://www.transactionlevelanalysis.com/2009/04/dude-youre-getting-the-cloud-1.html
The first post did not have an explicit 'Series' tag... apologies for any confusion.
Thanks for following this.