Hmm, look at it this way: 386 < 486 < pentium < pentium II < etc. Think of this as your base hardware logic. Rather than determining what POWER LEVEL you'll achieve, determine an outline of the tasks at hand. The beauty of this cluster concept is that you can assign tasks to each node/computer thereby increasing the speed and abilities of the different aspects of your task. Learn to think, multi-dimensional and multi-layered for your simultaneous multi-tasking environment.
Depends on the effiency of your code. That is more important than the hardware with the exception of the network speed/latency ...
That is interesting. Well, let's say I ask a computer to find a list of all prime numbers. So I come up with a POS algorithm. I want to distribute this task to 10 computers. Since I have no way of splitting up this algoritm into multiple ones, the best I can come up with is to send a group of numbers to a computer and have each computer do a batch and send them back to the main computer. The server computer acts as the batch giver and when .. let's say computer 8 has just finished finding out its batch of prime numbers, the server sends computer 8 a new batch to check out. All computers are sending back their batches to the server, which is keeping track of distribution of batches and keeping a database of all calculated information. I am an Econometrics major with a minor in mathematics -- I am not a CS major but program on the side, so I don't know the deepest details.
There isn't one that will give you a practically reliable answer, due to the number of other variables. Trust me: I've been employed doing computing performance analysis and capacity planning for along time. However, you can get some idea by looking for benchmark results here: www.spec.org www.cmg.org www.beowulf.org NG comp.benchmarks But first read this: Benchmarks - Fact Fiction or Fantasy
Yeah.... performance gains against a farm of number crunchers is going to be tightly coupled to the serial/lack of serial nature of the computation at hand. For example... if what your crunching can be done within the context of a SINGLE day of ES data, then your system will scale almost infinitely. 1000 computers (all identical), will perform this task nearly 1000 times faster than a single computer. HOWEVER... if your calculations are dependent on ALL previous data (the worst case), your seriously screwed and will have to be far more creative in how you break up the processing so it can be done in parallel. Alphe, you better write a cool ass screen saver like the Seti one, and get 10,000 home PC's to crunch the data for you It would be FREE this way. Or you could write a virus, and mail it to 1,000,000 idiots, which then downloads batches of data, crunches it, and returns it to you. All without being caught peace axeman
As I understand clusters are great for batch program number-crunching. Are they also great for realtime calculations, e.g. analysing the financial markets or would the latency be a problem here? I mean a 'do-it-yourself-at home-cluster', based on Pentium computers, linux , and ethernet.
Not an issue unless your calculations are so intensive they take so long that the entry opportunity has already passed. I at times have my computer watch about 500 stocks in parallel and doing computations on the fly. Its a 2.0 ghz P4, and bandwidth, not CPU is my bottle neck. Assuming I had the bandwidth, I could easily feed this to a cluster and watch every stock, tick by tick. peace axeman
Yes thats what I mean. T1 line and tick by tick data for ALL stocks and options and then analyse it on a small cluster (3-5 computers). Could this system be fast enough to give me the results in a timeframe of tens of seconds?
Well it would seem that if everyone goes from human trading to computer trading, then it really just matters who has: a) The fastest bandwidth b) Access to the most current quotes c) The better algorythm / program d) The CPU power to run it Let the games begin. Axeman, Great ideas!!! Also, there might be a way to tap into the routers upstream and intercept the data-transmissions and see who is buying and selling before the data got to the exchanges.
Aphie, sorry to dissapoint you but the idea is not so original: read the predictors, you'll see it is allready being done for a long time. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-7494140-3623001?v=glance&s=books&n=507846