... against fierce local opposition - and in the teeth of, yes, housing as potentially being an alternative use for the site. It's the controversial Brick Lane Data Centre which, in a delightfully pointed insult, offers 4 (four) units of social housing.
What makes it exquisitely amusing is that none other than Housing Secretary Angela 'Stamp-Duty' Rayner has been the one to put her name to the government order overriding lower-tier authorities that would have withheld approval. One can just imagine the agonies she will have gone through; but, hey, that's the price you pay for the privilege of slipping back into the Cabinet room, eh? Them's your orders, girl, and leave your scruples at the door. Still, at least she was able to push a junior minister out in front to make the actual announcement (in her name). Happily, Parliament is not sitting.
What I find doubly amusing is the way puzzled progressives can't understand how a data centre can be needed simply to speed up City financial transactions by milliseconds (which is one of the justifications for a DC in the East End). Surely, they, cry, this is some kind of capitalist joke? - nobody needs to make even quicker financial transactions ... do they ..? Well, I have a first-hand story about this for another occasion: bottom line, it's all a lot more real than the ignorant could ever imagine.
On the subject of Them's your orders, girl ... with the fatuous 'consultations' on the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields being about to close, we are all greatly looking forward to Miatta Fahnbulleh being forced to walk the same plank and approve one or perhaps both of them in the next few weeks (doubtless on one quiet Friday evening during the Recess, with another junior minister out in front). It'll be fun to watch her squirm.
ND
16 comments:
nobody needs to make even quicker financial transactions ... do they ..?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
"Many practical algorithms are in fact quite simple arbitrages which could previously have been performed at lower frequency—competition tends to occur through who can execute them the fastest rather than who can create new breakthrough algorithms."
Absolutely not an irrelevance. Trading desks often bypass the public internet entirely for their connectivity to exchanges.
While latency is a trivial concern for most internet users, apart from a few hardcore gamers (who have the same needs as those wanting a data centre in extremely close proximity to their physical location or adjacent to their connectivity destination) it is a real factor.
I pinged this very website by way of example:
Resolved to: ghs.google.com (Google Hosted Services) → IP 172.253.62.121
• Packet loss: 0%
• Latency (RTT):
• Min: 0.80 ms
• Average: 0.93 ms
• Max: 1.17 ms
Getting on for one millisecond is an eternity when you’re executing possibly hundreds of trades a minute or want to get ahead of market moving information.
A RTT of 1 ms is about what you expect of a host on your local LAN. Unless you work for Google or live next door to their DC, something else may well be responding.
As for HFT, a lot of it is price discovery (see what bid/offers are out there) and other shenanigans which don't add any actual utility or liquidity to the market.
Best not to use your own (crappy, retail product) ISP’s connection to test things like this in a like-for-like scenario. I used an AI agent to do the ping test to simulate the kind of setup a trader would have. 1ms is typical for a data centre to data centre connection (with their massive backhauls and super-optimised switches) but it’s still too long for the sort of players in this game.
0.1ms is the target time for the big boys, with unlimited budgets and the political influence to put in infrastructure exactly where they want it.
It really is a different world, with different motivations and different orders of magnitude of expectations of the amounts of money they can make. But yes, try it with your rubbishey home connection to see the difference in what kind of infrastructure is needed to compete with people who literally bet a billion at a time,
It's not only network latency that trading houses optimise for, but it has long been a thing that all the top binned chips from Intel were sucked up by quants seeking to gain the slightest advantage in HFT.
Delighted to find we have a rich seam of experts! My tale will wait for another time, but meanwhile ...
... presumably the companies proposing to build new data centres at a great distance from financial trading hubs, are therefore 'only' intending to have them used for AI / training / pedestrian 'retail' computing uses??
I'd imagine they'd have dedicated fibre data links to said hubs? A fair few US traders are based well away from Wall Street.
Susquehanna are based here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bala_Cynwyd,_Pennsylvania
Microwave transmission is used for HFT links because light is slower when run through glass.
1ms in a DC isn't typical - it's slow. Using "ping" as a test won't tell you the actual latency with any accuracy.
Port to port L2 switching is well down into microseconds with low latency switches in the 150 nanosecond range. Even in a super spine architecture, your at least the 500us.
Yes, but we're talking inter-data centre not intra-data centre when we're looking at trading systems talking to the exchanges (they are, if for nothing other than regaultory reasons, never co-located). They are in seperate premises and on physically segregated infrastructure.
What the traders are trying to do is get close to the latency you'd get intra-net while being inter-net. They'll never match the perfornace you'd see within the same data centre premises, but they want to get close, which is why the 0.1ms is a target. And certainly nothing like the 10ms you'd get on a typical retail product internet service is in any way acceptable or comprable in this market and for these types of users, which is why you were wrong to look at it that way in your earlier comment.
The closer the better, obviously, but what kills performance is transiting traffic through multiple switches and being subject to the routing tables and routing rules contained therin -- which can send your traffic round what can end up rather rambling routes (this was the whole design goal of the TCP/IP protocol, it would work its way around blocked or congested nodes). You wouldn't use routed IP for these types of connections, you'd use private wire / private circuits -- if not for the complete route, then covering a sizable chunk of the physical distance in a single cable (or as was noted above, point-to-point SHF radio).
Yes, the cost is exhorbitant (you have to cover all the installation costs for the private circuit and the ongoing maintenance, this is shared and split with hundreds of thousands of other users in a more conventional internet backhaul) and then double it because you need to avoid a Sinlge Point of Failure so you also need some reduncancy in your network route and equipment. But these guys don't care about that.
Come off it, nerds. Tell us how she's found a tax wangle on it to her own advantage.
Oh she is an entrepreneuse.
https://archive.ph/QRgvK
You could not rule this out! Anything is possible with Rayner, I bet we don’t know the half of it…
Tax monies don't come from poor homeless people, unless you shackle them to a treadmill. Not very effective, better to build datacentres to serve City types. In a sane world you could build housing and datacentres. But 'someone won't like it' - that is what politics is for.
In the end humanity living as we do is not 'sustainable'. But for now we must muddle along as best and find room for data centres (bastions of wicked capitalism) and housing (bastions of socialist foolishness). We must find room for both.
I worked in a major City datacentre until retired over 30 years back. One of our ongoing problems was capacity and speed. Not much has changed. Back then one price change on the NYSE would trigger a whole cascade of price changes on futures, options and all derivatives. All to be pushed out to customers who reacted by further buying and selling to maintain positions. Even 40 years ago Microsoft price could change 40 times/second. A mad treadmill but it paid a good wedge.
Glad to see politicians realising that choices have to me made. Unpopularity and brickbats are part of the job. Tough titty.
For 30 years read 25, for 40 years read 35.
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