NASDAQ crashed today, was hacked several times in the past, and...

[GreyGeek]

was attacked by squirrels on two occasions. The squirrels were not responsible today.

Remember that "Highly Reliable Times" ad campaign by Microsoft? The one in which they bragged about beating out Linux in a "head to head" competition, which never actually took place? In that ad they bragged about their .NET solution to the London Stock Exchange trading system. Right up to the point where their system collapsed and put the LSE off line for an entire day and cost them over $1 Billion dollars. The LSE bought a Linux trading system and recently reported that their transaction time is 124 microseconds, or 0.124 milliseconds. The .NET solution was attempting to get under 2 milliseconds but never made it before it crashed.

Well, guess what? Microsoft has another page in the "Case Study" website about the NASDAQ!
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies...eStudyID=49271
They call their NASDAQ software "Highly Reliable", the same term used to describe their "solution" for the LSE.
MS took down their LSE case study after the crash so I suspect they'll do the same here. While the web page dates from November of 2005 I suspect that they would have already taken it down if the NASDAQ had switched to another vendor.

[tek_heretik]

Actually, 5,000 per second and 100,000 per day is not that much, whoop-dee-doo.

[GreyGeek]

The LSE is getting 8,065 transactions per second. The .NET solution couldn't reach 500 transaction per second, and crashed trying.
Even 5,000 transactions in the LSE (or other stock trading application) environment IS a big thing. If you think you can do much better you have some big paychecks waiting for you!

[tek_heretik]

The LSE is getting 8,065 transactions per second. The .NET solution couldn't reach 500 transaction per second, and crashed trying.
Even 5,000 transactions in the LSE (or other stock trading application) environment IS a big thing. If you think you can do much better you have some big paychecks waiting for you!

With today's hardware, come on, that's a walk in the park. If my computer can transcode a 90 minute 720p HD movie in 20 minutes...and to me, that's even slow, imagine if I built a new machine, 4 SSD RAID 0 (2GB/sec read/write). Maybe the network sucks, then again there is security up the whazoo (most likely a ton of encryption), those pesky Chinese, lol.

[woodsmoke]

well, there's software bottlenecks and hardware bottlenecks and......

just where is that bottle of rum!? lol

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

You are misgauging the size of the problem, which is more than just running a byte converter on a single machine. A transaction begins when a trader presses the commit button for a transaction on his screen. The relavant data processes, values computed, and within 124 microseconds the transaction appears on the screens of 300 other computers inside the LSE local network (yes, it's fast) and only a faction of a second later on several thousand screens in other locations.

And, it wasn't the Chinese, it was the Russians. Even worse, they were inside NASDAQ from 2005 until last year -- SEVEN YEARS, before they were detected and caught.
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/artic...us-prosecutors

[GreyGeek]

They are now blaiming the UTP SIP system.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...pid=1398720840

Here is what the "Unlisted Trading Priviledges" on the "Securities Information Processor" is:
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=UTPSupport

Here are the specifications of the UTP:
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/content/...cification.pdf
As you might suspect, it is NOT a simple system.

[GreyGeek]

Woha, now there is this bit of news!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08...any_windows_8/

Microsoft's new touchy Windows 8 operating system is so vulnerable to prying hackers that Germany's businesses and government should not use it, the country's authorities have warned in a series of leaked documents.


According to files published in German weekly Die Zeit, the Euro nation's officials fear Germans' data is not secure thanks to the OS's Trusted Computing technology – a set of specifications and protocols that relies on every computer having a unique cryptographic key built into the hardware that's used to dictate what software can be run.