Lab49: LinuxPlanet

It’s kind of cool to see Lab49 getting some press time while at the SIA show. I see Luke and Dan managed to get onto LinuxPlanet.

Having worked on a number of grid projects I’d have to agree that Linux usage within grid farms does occur, but its usually mixed in with a good percentage of Windows nodes (assuming the investment bank isn’t a Microsoft shop in which case the grid is 100% Windows) and possible some Solaris nodes. Cooling and power issues aren’t just grid issues; I think almost any company who builds a sizeable data centre has the issues. Anyone know what OS Charles Schwab is using on there grid – given that its not Linux, it has to be Solaris or Windows?

Bear Stearns CTO is correct in that the challenges of grid computing aren’t Linux/Windows grid products, but more the ability to move legacy application onto the grid and parallelized the processing to take advantage of n nodes.

Regarding Mono, last time I looked at using it within an investment banks the real issues centred around whether Microsoft at some point in the future would do anything to undermine Mono. Mono itself is a cool open source implementation of the CLR. Year on year the codebase gets better. At the time I looked at it, the biggest issue was the Remoting bugs, but they were fixed a long time ago. Will any investment bank has the guts to deploy Mono on its servers to run .NET trading software? I’m not sure. If the bank has already deployed Microsoft .NET to all its workstations why wouldn’t it just use Microsoft .NET on the server unless it explicitly wants to use a non-Windows OS which is unusual since the only banks who really deploy .NET servers are the Microsoft shop banks. However, if just one large bank moving into using Mono, the ripple effect could happen very quickly. Investment banks like to follow the leader.

~ by mdavey on June 29, 2006.