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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."
Not to derail the conversation, but high frequency trading doesn't contribute much to the stock market's ability to set optimal prices.
What actually happens is that high frequency traders squeeze in while prices are moving and they siphon off money. Neither the original seller, nor the original buyer gets the best price, and the high frequency traders make a mint.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Said the CTO who is now looking for a job.
NYSE closes at 4:30. But there are other markets. And the data flows 24/7.
There is no reason for these systems to have spare cycles.
But Virtual Machine's are only as good as they're designed. Even the most known and biggest vendor VMWare has had serious bug and exploits in their software. For one example see this, which let an exe running in the guest OS exploit a vulnerability in the VM code to get code run in the host OS. A serious security risk, especially when were talking about Wall Street. Even getting an access to their internal network opens new possibilities.
Just because of this I think it's a stupid idea. Even more so because the gain is not really that much, but it can be really destructive. Someone will find a way to exploit it.
I could see this being useful as some sort of "private" cloud during off hours (i.e. selling time to banks for batch and accrual operations...etc), but allowing the unwashed masses access to the underlying infrastructure of something as important as financial trading just seems like a recipe for a security disaster.