What kind of computers do Quantitative hedge funds use?

BASIC ANSWER: Nothing super secret here.

Development is done on Apple iMac’s, actual production & development of strategy, order, backtest systems are hosted on AWS EC2 platform (mostly Ubuntu w/ a few Windows servers). We utilize AWS RDS for database servers.

Our systems are designed as micro-services (JSON REST API’s allow servers to communicate) instead of 1 large monolithic application. This allows Parabolic Capital to dynamically scale hardware & load balance different parts of the application as demand increases (spin up new AWS EC2 / RDS hardware “instances” very easily).

New code is pulled down daily using “git” on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. None of this requires a lot of computing power, except for the backtesting servers that have to sift through billions of pieces of data (862k new rows of data DAILY for 21 yrs) related to stock/etf prices and option data. Ours systems don’t collect intraday data, so we essentially trade the daily/weekly charts. If we were to trade with higher frequency intraday, it would be 400x worth of data.