Knight Capital, a firm that specializes in executing trades for retail brokers, took $440 million in cash losses Wednesday due to a faulty test of new trading software. In headlines it’s being called a trading “glitch,” which isn’t nearly as accurate as the term I’d use: “f**king disaster.” The broad outline of the story is here and more colorful, bloody details are here.

Briefly, here’s what happened: Knight Capital’s worst day in IT started Wednesday morning with a test run of their new trading software. An old pal of mine who’s following the story closely (and is also deep in both IT and trading) told me that the company set up the software to work with only a few stocks. They also set the buy/sell points well outside where the markets were currently trading to ensure that nothing would actually execute.

But somehow – and this will probably the be the subject of several lawsuits, books, and maybe even a Broadway musical – the software didn’t behave as expected. It went out and did what it was designed to do: execute lots and lots of trades very, very quickly.

As part of a look back at ISC’12, the guys talk about the Student Cluster Challenge. Dan proposes a joint ISC/Supercomputing challenge so we can crown a world student cluster champion – and award a massive trophy. The hosts discuss…

A conversation with Jack Dongarra (of Top500 list fame) at ISC’12 is the inspiration for a spirited discussion of whether the venerable LINPACK benchmark has outlived its usefulness. Dan accuses Henry of cursing the darkness; then they talk about what…

What happens when technology lies to you? Dan rants about discovering that his exercise machine has been lying to him for more than a year now, but the episode (thankfully) evolves into a discussion of benchmarks and benchmarking. Bonus: one…

Join Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Henry Newman of Instrumental, Inc. and our own Dan Olds for this series of podcasts about all things HPC. In this first episode, the guys talk about Data Integrity and the menace of Silent Data…

Stony Brook University (profile here) has had their work cut out for them at the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Competition. From the very beginning, they had software problems with their cluster, requiring them to concentrate on troubleshooting and repairing while…

China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT, profile here) is staying true to its heritage by being the only team to use a hybrid CPU/GPU system at the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg. NUDT, like Team Tsinghua, had…

The Tsinghua University team (profile here) didn’t take the easy way to the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg. They had to fight their way through five other universities, all competing to carry the Chinese flag, in an intra-country…

The home team at the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Challenge, Team KIT (profile here), is a confident bunch. Not quite cocky, but confident. They made it through their first cluster competition with almost-flying colors – they had significant problems on…