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Australian Company Promises Switching Hardware With Sub-130ns Latency
snowdon writes "The race for low-latency in finance and HPC has taken a major turn. A bunch of engineers from Australia have 'thrown away the air conditioning' in a traditional switch, to get a 10G fibre-to-fibre latency of less than 130ns! Way faster than more traditional offerings. This lady (video) would tell you that it's equivalent to just 26m of optical fibre. Does that mean we just lose money faster?"
The trick was not reading TFA.
We can extract even more money from the economy into our coffers.
Now they can suck our economy dry with even more speed and efficiency!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So they've taken the idea from a couple of the low-latency 10Gb switching companies that failed and moved it to fibre switching MUX for the financial trading industry. yeah. Zzzz...
Call me in a year or so when this tech makes it's way into the general ODM pipeline and we can buy some in bulk.
Or perhaps folks like Cumulus will have this soon anyway?
Pfft, I can't win Quake matches with that latency.
Darn work and filtering. ;-) Oh well..... I'll bookmark and watch it when I get home 11 hours from now.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Can these numbers be directly compared to the "fiber-to-fiber latency" reported in the article summary?
Useless factoid: Light moves pretty close to 1 foot per nanosecond in free space,
but it takes a special kind of imperial brain with metric-sized feet to appreciate this point.
This is not good news; it promotes a trend in a technological approach to making money in the stock market that should be flat out illegal.
Where you could previously only bailout one ot two banks per year, thanks to this technology about a dozen bailouts are now possible.... Isn't it nice.
The trick was not reading TFS.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Is like playing the Russian roulette game. With plutonium bullets. Close to a fuel tank.
Yes, we'll all loose money much faster!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
This is funny because all the banking companies, in the past, removed their firewalls on their intoconnection with trading places. Now that they've been hacked left and right, they are starting to put them back because of this. Firewall vendors are now starting a war with regards to latency (also keep in mind this is one-way latency).
Fortinet for instance announced a sub-9 microseconds firewall. That's 9000 nanoseconds. Check Point followed-up with a sub-5 microseconds latency. Oh, this is with 64 bytes packets, pretty much the minimum size you can get on a link.
With such "bottle necks" I don't see the point of going to the 100's in the nano-second (but I'm not a layer 2-3 guy, I'm layer 4-7 all the way) given this.
A solution seems to be timestamping the financial requests when the order is sent, and when the server receives the packet it can back-order at the price of the stock when the order was given. I guess it's better not to buy stock than to buy it at the wrong price. But then again, I don't like high-speed trading very much and I'd rather have this concept die.
It would have helped in the Facebook IPO. All the investors with this level of link would have devalued Facebook stock faster than normal folks on DSL could have bought it.
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:FB
Expand out the whole chart. Looks like a great design for a water slide at a kiddie park.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Even if a lot of research has been put into reducing the latencies of switching technology, the vast majority of real-world deployments are nowhere near where they should be. The result is corporations spending millions upgrading their core switching, and then the result is the same or worse than what they had with ordinary gigabit technology.
I've been to more than half a dozen sites recently with new installations of 10 GbE, but with terrible network performance. All too often, I'm seeing latencies as high as 1.3 milliseconds even for servers on the same switch. Read up on bandwidth-delay product too get an idea of why this would severely nerf throughput. The odd thing is that at a number of these sites, older servers with 1 GbE connected to the same switching infrastructure get 100% of wire speed without issues.
I don't know exactly what the root cause is, but I'm starting to suspect that the extra latency is coming from somewhere that network engineers don't usually test, like CPU power management taking an excessively long time to wake up a core to respond to a packet. What I think happens is something like this:
- The fast network delivers a burst of data very quickly.
- The receiver CPU starts to slowly wake up from sleep mode, while the sender is waiting for an ACK packet, because it has finished sending an entire TCP window.
- The sender CPU goes to sleep, because it still has nothing to do.
- The receiver CPU finally gets around to the packet, which it processes quickly and efficiently, sending the ACK back.
- The receiver OS sees that the CPU is "0.1%" busy, has nothing to do now, so it sends it to back to sleep.
- The sender CPU starts to slowly wake up, while the receiver is also asleep, waiting patiently for more data.
- The cycle repeats, with more waiting at every step.
With slightly slower networks or CPUs, the CPUs never get a chance to be idle long enough to enter a sleep state, so everything is always ready for more data. I've seen 3x improvements in iPerf TCP throughput by simply running a busy-loop in a background process!
Unfortunately, their hardware has the unfortunate side-effect of flipping all bits upside-down.
Unfortunately, their hardware has the unfortunate side-effect of flipping all bits upside-down.
This is actually to the benefit of their sales department because you always have to buy them in pairs. :D
This is not a switch, it's a fan-out device for one-to-many and many-to-one communications. It does not do L2 forwarding, MAC address learning, security, multicast, QoS, or congestion control. It's only use is for a SINGLE host to exchange low-latency lightweight messages with a bunch of other hosts. 10GE is used for its low latency properties only. In fact, if you actually tried to send any sort of high traffic volume through this mux, it would fall on its face.
High Frquency Taxes on that market would be a consequent development.
Well they already have loops of cables behind servers to ensure that no one could have a possible advantage. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-11/kohler-high-frequency-trade-parasites-at-heart-of-asx/3943052
Anyone with a mind set in reality will understand how didiculous that is!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!