How Microwave Transmission Is Linking Financial Centers At Near-Light Speed 236
The L.A. Times has a short but compelling article about the state of the art (and coming state of the art) in dedicated networking technology in one of the applications where you'd expect the customers to care most about it: connecting financial trading centers. Milliseconds count, and the traders count milliseconds. From the article, one example:
"[New York-based networking company] Strike, whose ranks include academics as well as former U.S. and Israeli military engineers, hoisted a 6-foot white dish on a tower rising 280 feet above the Nasdaq Stock Market's data center in Carteret, N.J., just outside New York City.
Through a series of microwave towers, the dish beams market data 734 miles to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's computer warehouse in Aurora, Ill., in 4.13 milliseconds, or about 95% of the theoretical speed of light, according to the company. Fiber-optic cables, which are made up of long strands of glass, carry data at roughly 65% of light speed."
Improving the lives of ordinary citizens (Score:2, Interesting)
Every day Slashdot should have one story that features a technological advance which could improve the daily lives of ordinary citizens.
This isn't the one.
Can go somewhat faster... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sending a neutrino beam through the earth will be faster than taking the great-circle route across the surface of the earth.
Of course, one would have to send a ridiculously large number of neutrinos to be sure to have them detected, but that's just an engineering problem.
Re:God knows (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:But (Score:3, Interesting)
Time for somebody to put up some tall, shiny aluminum billboards on rural estate along a certain 734-mile path...
News? Well, interesting perhaps... (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering the Nova episode 'making things faster' with David Pouge as the host presented this over a month ago, and they have production lead time delayse amounting to months, I'm with the people suggesting that this is a repeat. And hardly qualifies as 'news'.
That said, cool.
Also noted in the Nova episode was that the physical path that the fiber-optic route takes is going to be longer than the path that the microwave route takes.
If they are not doing it already, I would suspect that the next step will be to move the repeater electronics up to the microwave dishes at the intermediary locations. My experience with telcom is that this is usually housed in the shelter at the base of the towers, however if they can locate it with the dishes it will eliminate a path distance of at least twice the sum of the elevations of the dishes, divided by the velocity factor of the media they use to connect those, (roughly 1 for dry waveguide, and usually between .6 and .9 for different varieties of co-ax media.) It's not a lot, but if they are looking to eliminate every possible delay, that's got to be in their plans.
Local silicon beats microwave everytime (Score:4, Interesting)
The high speed trading field is bein geviscerated by the placement of FPGA based devices on fiber leaving the building. There's no point ot a "high speed link", with all the insanity involved in that technology, when you can program a sophisticated monitor and sales control tool right outside the stock exchange.
Now, the center that analyzes the history of such data and builds your models of how to respond can be in another state and pre-program the FPGA. But these devices are already being used: It took me twenty minutes to stop laughing at a job interview with one such company: I was unsure just which of my talents they wee interested in until I noticed a display of such devices, and realized they wanted me to assist in their migration to a much, much cheaper part of the country for all their modeling and analysis tools, and just leave a box or two of Nallatech FPGA cards at the New York Stock Exchange.
It was amazing how fast they put the NDA in front of me when I explained the implications to their core business model, and started tying it to the repercussions of moving *away* from the human contacts that provide back channel, essentially insider knowledge, when the analysis boxes are no longer in the data center with your own staff on site. My speculative "if you need to tune these models manually, you need to secure the information, and who is allowed to change that model? how do you manage the provenance of such orders" discussion apparently set off alarm bells that urged them to get me under an NDA, whether or not they ever made an offer. Life got really adventuresome when I refused to sign an NDA without an offer on the table.
Re:News? Well, interesting perhaps... (Score:4, Interesting)
Already done some years ago. Dish has redundant modules on the back that only need power and cat 5 for ip down. Cross connect across tower legs on same tower to the next dish and go
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
To avoid this the trade system should delay all transaction with a random factor between 10 and 20 minutes. That should make microtrading completely useless.
Re:But (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the 10 to 20 minute random delay is to equalize for human traders,