Wall St. Trading Servers To Power Off-Hour Clouds?

miller60 writes "As cloud computing gains traction, some Wall Street firms running armadas of servers to power high-frequency trading operations are contemplating leasing out their excess computing capacity after the trading day ends at 4 p.m. 'Once 4:30 rolls around, we don't need those machines,' said one CTO of a market data firm. 'There may be an opportunity there.' A similar revelation led to the creation of the cloud computing operation at Amazon.com, which built its infrastructure to handle peak Christmas-season loads that lasted just a few weeks each year."

Comments

Re:"Once 4:30 rolls around..."

[keithpreston]

Location is the reason these system have spare cycles. They build data centers across the street from the market so that they have the lowest latency access to the market (it matters for high frequency trading). A data center on Wall Street is useless for other markets.

Re:"Once 4:30 rolls around..."

[mystik]

These High-Frequency trading systems require sub-second responses from the market servers. They're usually collocated in the same structure as the marketing servers, and firms pay handsomely for that kind of space and network access.

When that market closes, you don't want these machines trading overseas, the latency to reach those servers would negate the entire purpose of these machines.