Notes from the LF End User Summit

“Bridging the gap between users and developers is one of the
tasks the Linux Foundation has set for itself; the annual End User
Summit is intended to help toward that goal.

“The End User Summit draws a different crowd than any other
event. Well-known Linux developers are present, certainly, but they
do not form the majority of the crowd; they are, instead, strongly
outnumbered by representatives of banks, insurance companies, and
financial firms. Old conference T-shirts are far outnumbered by
suits and ties in this crowd. The End User Summit, in other words,
caters to enterprise distribution customers and others who are
using Linux in high-stakes situations – even a major stock exchange
which has based its operation on Gentoo. It makes for an
interesting combination of people and a unique set of
conversations.

“One speaker was Brian Clark from the New York Stock Exchange.
NYSE’s systems run under high pressure and tight constraints. They
process some three billion transactions per day – more than Google
does – and those transactions need to execute in less than one
millisecond. Customers can switch to competing exchanges instantly
and for almost no cost, so if NYSE’s systems are not performing,
its customers will vanish. A typical trading day involves the
processing of 1.5TB of data; some 8 petabytes of data are kept
online. And this whole operation runs on Linux.”

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