New problems, new architectures

I originally wrote a piece on my sun/oracle blog called “Are “Quants” suitable for grid infrastructure?” I used a finance dictionary to create a dichotomy between Quants & Chartists and suggested that new IT architectures were needed to deal with trends and forecasting, especially if applied to portfolios and baskets. I reproduce the words here, as I was clearly struggling towards a forecast about big data and new application’s and implementation architectures. The original is not tagged “big data” as it wasn’t a current term at that time. …

Will CPU trading enable an FX market??

I met with Roger Day, Sun’s Engineering Director responsible for building Sun’s Utility Grid. We had a long conversation. I was eager to explore how one makes the outputs of the grid homogeneous, since the homogeneity of commodity is one of its axiomatic qualities. He asked me what I thought of the idea of an exchange. I replied that my view is that if we can create a primary market, and it looks like we can, a secondary market will follow. I wonder though if people will look to exchange Solaris CPU/hours for AIX or even Windows CPU/hours. Will we have a cycle FX market?. …

Utility Computing

I attended an all day seminar in Utility Computing. Couple of interesting presentations, the day was opened by Jim Baty and closed by Bill Vass. Frankly, its been a patchy day and I’m still not sure how firms requiring competitive advantage from their IT can leverage utility offerings because the suppliers will need a degree of homogeneity. It was definitely interesting and heartening to hear that several customers, who have the expertise to build the complex grids on which today’s utility offerings are to be based, are still coming to Sun;  …