On 09/04/2014 01:13 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Glen Slick
<glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
The information I got from the seller here is that these were pulled
from from something like a stock trader firm where speed was
everything.
I've known folks in that biz, and 20 years ago, it was all Sun
SPARC
(the guys I knew anyway).
I built the workstations and servers for a small "program trading" group
that was being formed within a big investment bank in 1992. Yes it was
all being built on SPARC systems, but if anybody in that line of work
could make a case for using any tool or product to make a buck faster,
they'd have gone for it.
My best guess - given what the seller's indicated - would be that the
QED's were used in an existing ticker plant or market data system,
handling leased line serial comms on one side, using the RAM disk to
buffer data or speed up queries, and just horked the data around without
acting on it. If it's just packets or blocks of data being fed to other
systems, the lack of floating point wouldn't matter so much.
--S.