3 ms·
It's easy to make things cheap by making them wrong. Making things fast though is a whole other world.
by thr_low_latency 3y ago
It's easy to make things cheap by making them wrong.
Making things fast though is a whole other world.
- roflyear 3y ago"You can't get better by scaling out" disagrees with you. That's my point - if you scale out, it's more expensive.
- thr_low_latency 3y agoThe first step of getting decent latency out of modern computers is to build a pile of cash that's taller than you then set it on fire. They are optimized for throughput, not latency. If you want to do things in microseconds instead of anything from milliseconds to seconds you look at all the lovely code everyone has written in the last 40 years then throw it on top of the burning pile of cash. I work in an area where microseconds matter and have to write everything from scratch in kernel mode C because nothing else cuts it.
- winstonprivacy 3y agoExactly my experience as well.
- boppo1 3y ago> write everything from scratch in kernel mode C because nothing else cuts it. Neat. Is that all for custom processors too?
- SkipperCat 3y agoThe cost of writing software isn't as horrible as the cost of colocating in the various financial exchanges. The market data feed costs are massive and you really need to make a significant amount of money trading just to cover the infrastructure costs.
- thr_low_latency 3y agoThe salaries of the people doing this sort of thing start at mid six figures out of university and go up substantially from there.
- smabie 3y agoCompensation for employees in HFT tend to be extremely high. Employee comp number one cost for any trading firm.
- SkipperCat 3y agoYes, the cost is very high. But the cost of an good software engineer at Google, Facebook or another top tier firm is also very high. However, when Google buys a WAN link from NYC to CHI, they pay $XX dollars because they don't care about the latency too much. When a HFT buys that same link, they'll spend three times that much just to get a link that is a few milliseconds faster. Also, the colocation costs at the major exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE, CBOE) are insane. A cabinet in one of those data centers can be 3x as much as a cabinet somewhere else. I guess what I'm saying is there are a lot things in the HFT world where you have to spend a lot more money than you would if you were doing similar amounts of work at any other tech firm.
- smabie 3y agoYep totally agree: HFT pays out the ass for any tech due to their very particular requirements.
- smabie 3y agoThis is my experience as well: almost no existing software is written with ultra low latency in mind (it's optimized for throughput instead). Getting latency in the micros with low jitter is extremely difficult and requires a bunch of custom software. And getting into the nanos requires a bunch of custom hardware.