I'm setting mine up now with the help of an IT guy. He's telling me that enterprize is similar to XP and that RAM management is able to dedicate RAM to processors to applications.
Does anybody have any experience with distributed computing / grid computing? ------------------- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing http://www.parabon.com/what-computation-on-demand-is-used-for/financial-forecasting.html http://www.xtremwebch.net/xtremweb.php
Serious 40-50% overclocking can indeed lead to instability, overheating and require expensive high quality parts. However, modest 20-30% overclocking is absolutely safe, doesn't need any special hardware or cooling. You only need to change 3-4 settings in the BIOS. Google it or ask any neighbour computer kid to do that for you. These days, 64-bit OS is a must for high-performance system, even if you only run 32-bit applications. 32-applications will be able to use up to 2GB memory EACH (while on 32-but OS all applications together must share the same 2-3GB memory space). And there is something that has changed in recent years- your electricity bill will likely exceed cost of you computer over its lifetime! Did you consider colocation?
32 bit XP accesses about 3.5 GB. Figure about a third to a half for OS gives a 32 bit app 3 gig of core. I once saw an ad on some home shopping channel for Windows 95. The seller talked about how it was 32 bits compared to all the 16 bit stuff that was currently available. Then he said "32 bits let's you run two 16 bit applications at a time." There are various levels of overclocking, ranging from some simple tweaks to a lot of extra equipment like water coolers. You can get as crazy-go-nuts as you'd like, getting results ranging from a few points to 30 or even 40%. You might find it most cost effective to use distributed computing to increase your backtesting efficiency. Buy a few computers and split the tasks up. Building your own system is pretty easy, fun, can save you money and allow you to build a serious system with quality components. Pricewatch.com used to be the place to check for great hardware prices, but now Newegg pretty much has about the lowest prices, an awesome reputation and great customer service so most folks just go there. When I build a new system or do a major upgrade, I get 90-100% of the parts from NewEgg, and maybe one or two things from some other special deal on a different site. You can go to boards like SharkyExtreme.com, Anandtech.com and Tom's Hardware to get as much information as you'll need.
Ad hominem attacks rarely serve to strengthen one's argument. On the contrary, they tend to weaken your position substantially. The 10% figure I quoted is a conservative estimate of the stable clocks that can be obtained by practically anyone at stock voltage; overclocking at stock voltage produces zero increase in heat generation. I'm sure you knew that though... I only mentioned my AMD box to illustrate the kind of stability and longevity possible if you know what you're doing; a 66% overclock is nothing to sneeze at. While I only use it as a file server/HTPC these days, I didn't and wouldn't currently have any consternation about trading with it. I have no doubt that the builders who profited from selling you obscenely overpriced machines were more than happy to tell you that overclocking your processor causes instability; they're only looking to maximize their profits, something a trader would understand. Truth-be-told, builders like Alienware, Falcon Northwest, etc. are a running joke among knowledgeable computer enthusiasts as their entire business model relies on patronage by the ignorant and uninformed; in this regard, one could reasonably refer to them as the CNBC of pc retail. Several of them are notorious for using cheap power supplies - generally the most important component of a stable overclock, especially in power-hungry multiple GPU builds. As a general rule, one can build his/her own machine with equal or higher quality components for about a third of the price. I realize this is beyond the capability and/or willingness of the OP and yourself, but no need to propagate misinformation.
the computer i'm using now is 18 months old and has been overclocked by 40% with stock voltage and stock fan, and it's rock stable with no heat issues. it all depends on the quality of your motherboard, cpu and memory. some are great for OC, some suck. just make sure you test it well.
I think the reality though is if your backtests are taking 2 days then a brute strength, 30% decrease in time from a hardware upgrade really isn't very meaningfull. I would look for a better software solution to your problems first. If that is not an option and if AB is not multithreaded maybe a better idea would be to build a farm of 5-10 older single core p4 pieces of junk for backtesting 5-10 ideas at once. Even if it took a bit longer than your current machine your productivity would go up a few hundred %.
Don't listen to these pansies talking about not overclocking. Done right, and tested for a short period, your OC'd machine will run for YEARS without a hiccup. Better even than standard clocking , as the chip knows its being used by an eL1te Usah. What kind of test are you doing that takes so long? Amibroker is pretty fast, you sure its coded well. Or maybe you're optimizing 10 parms 10,000 each step 1.
Ha ha. Yeah, I'm an eL1te Usah, or soon will be, with my kick-ass overclocked machine. My backtesting is something like that...many parameters, stepping by one, and testing on one-minute data to boot. And to make matters worse, my algorithms demand exhaustive testing, rather than using intelligent optimization. Even AmiBroker will run slow, with what I'm trying to do. It's really supercomputer stuff. But I'm not an experienced enough coder to write a multi-threaded C++ app for CUDA. So I have to stick with standard trading platforms for now. No complaints on AmiBroker, though. Best in its class for robust backtesting.