Performance: Rackspace Cloud vs Amazon Web Services
Performance related posts and articles seem to be rather popular, with my Java vs C++ post being one of the big traffic drivers on this blog. Now it's time to do another one, with a very specific use case in mind.
I'm into the third and final term for my masters in quantitative finance. As part of this term I'm doing a dissertation and the topic is basically high frequency trading strategies. So what I'm doing is looking at a relatively large amount of data and applying different trading strategies to this data. The data consists of 1 minute OHLC bars + volume for all stocks in the S&P 100 going back about 10 years.
Uncompressed and stored as comma separated text files this constitutes about 6 GB of data, and when imported to a database this is just under 118 million rows, each row being a one minute bar for one ticker. I don't feel like torturing my laptop with all the analysis I'm running the coming months, and its also only got two cores so it would be beneficial to "outsource" this to external servers.
Luckily, in these "cloud computing" times, gaining short term access to X number of servers is easy, and also reasonably priced. But who should I choose? There's two dominating players I'm going to evaluate: Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Services.