One of the architectural principles for designing solutions is the concept of time. I learned this concept from watching friends at OSIsoft and Thetus. DatacenterDynamics reports on Equinix adding a time stamp service to trades.
EQUINIX PUTS TIME STAMPS ON ELECTRONIC TRADES
Could put an end to disputes amongst finance brokersData center provider Equinix is to offer clients a time-stamping service for electronic trading which can be used in any of the important financial markets across the globe.
The risk compliant service, based on Perseus Telecom’s High Precision Time (HPT) system, will be available in financial service strongholds such as Chicago, Frankfurt, London, New York and Tokyo and should make it cheaper and safer to verify electronic trades.
The finance industry is required to time-stamp all trades to US NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) standard timing. The Perseus system works to sub-nanosecond accuracy, giving an objective measure to determine which trades occurred first. It means companies no longer have to connect directly to NIST, and will be safer from disruption and malicious attacks that can occur with a GPS connection.
There are many other ways time can support addressing problems.
2 years Wired reported on Google’s use of GPS for its WW database problems.
This week, as reported by GigaOm and ZDnet, Google published a research paperdetailing the ins and outs of Spanner. According to Google, it’s the first database that can quickly store and retrieve information across a worldwide network of data centers while keeping that information “consistent” — meaning all users see the same collection of information at all times — and it’s been driving the company’s ad system and various other web services for years.
Spanner borrows techniques from some of the other massive software platforms Google built for its data centers, but at its heart is something completely new. Spanner plugs into a network of servers equipped with super-precise atomic clocks or GPS antennas akin to the one in your smartphone, using these time keepers to more accurately synchronize the distribution of data across such a vast network. That’s right, Google attaches GPS antennas and honest-to-goodness atomic clocks to its servers.