The Matrix but w/money: high-freq trading (HFT)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

From ars technica: The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed trading.

"Supercomputers pitted against one another in a high-stakes battle of attack and counterattack over a global network where predatory algorithms trawl the information stream, competing every millisecond to gain an informational advantage over rivals. It sounds like Hollywood fiction, but it's just an average trading day on the stock market."

Note that NJ is the center of this HFT cloud, in order to minimize latency in the NYSE ECN trades.

Note also that "those pit traders who pose for the cameras are mainly there for the cameras." I.e., they are props for a set.

This is reminescent of the PR for the first public demonstration of the ENIAC (one of the world's first stored-program, electronic computers):

"In planning their public demonstration in 1946, it occurred to the ENIAC team to place translucent spheres-- ping-pong balls cut in half-- over the neon bulbs that displayed the values of each of ENIAC's twenty accumulators. Ever since, flashing lights have been part of the scene involving computers and science fiction."

One thing that hasn't changed in the intervening 60 years: Stagecraft.

Google’s Chiller-less Data Center

Image via Wikipedia

Google has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data center management.

Google Unveils Its Container Data Center

In 2007 Google received a U.S. patent for a portable data center in a shipping container.

Google uncloaks once-secret server

Image by manfrys via Flickr

Google on the Gorge may have been the first datacenter Google actually owned, versus rented.

Video on youtube.

Video on youtube.

Data Centers as Information Substations

Quotes from:

Data Center Overload
Tom Vanderbilt, NYT, June 8, 2009.

The data center is our railroad; it doesn’t matter what kind of train you put on it. . . .

While it once took 30 to 50 years for electricity costs to match the cost of the server itself, the electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas. . . .

The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles — and three milliseconds — from Philadelphia, and into NJ2 (a data center located in NJ), where the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.) . . .

We’re at the beginning of the information utility. The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow. . . .

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Image by Sue Waters via Flickr

Dark Side of the Cloud: Botnets

Is your Windows PC part of a Black Cloud?

Vinton Cerf, 'Father of the Internet,' UO Video Channel

Vinton Cerf is an American computer scientist who is the "person most often called 'the father of the Internet'." His contributions have been recognized repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Wikipedia)



Cerf presented a lecture, "Tracking the internet into the 21st century" at 11:00am on October 17 in the Ford Lecture Hall of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon campus. Andrzej Proskurowski, CIS Head, introduced the speaker.



For video of the actual lecture, please see the UO Libweb archive.



For additional information about the lecture see Distinguished Lecture Series - Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century.

Ch. 13 Information Privacy Rights

Articles in the news related to ch. 13



Google Latitude: An In-Depth Look

Employers: Could Google Latitude Get You Sued?



The Cellphone: Navigating [& Tracking?] Our Lives



Scientific American's issue on Privacy: Privacy in an Age of Terabytes and Terror