Light Speed and Then Some

Throughout each series, Burke repeated the pattern again and again. After reading a story in the Telegraph, I've come to realize that we are at one of those tipping points Burke made famous. Two physicists from the University of Koblenz in Germany claim to have broken the speed of light. According to the story, they have been able to transmit microwave photons between two prisms standing three feet apart "instantaneously."

This occurred in a research laboratory, which means that it will be at least a decade or more before this "quantum tunneling" will be a practical technology for mass consumption.

So what will this mean for computer networking and the financial technology industry? First, it could finally retire that old saw: "You can't go faster than the speed of light," when it comes to selecting datacenter locations. A primary datacenter located in the bowels of the Rocky Mountains or on a retired oil-drilling rig somewhere in the North Sea would no longer seem so farfetched.

Physicists theorize that by traveling faster than the speed of light, objects will arrive at a destination before they leave. Imagine what that could mean for trading and quote dissemination in the future: the ultimate low-latency connection. If a trader submits an order after market close but the order arrives before the close, would that be considered post trading? I don't envy the regulators who have to hash out the new market timing issues. This is all fun musing for the moment, but the industry is approaching another tipping point. This one centers on the evolution of the humble CPU. As processor makers continue to increase the core count in their CPUs, processing capabilities are going through the roof.

Engineers at Intel have created a proof-of-concept processor with 80 cores in order to test the scalability of multi-core processors. Don't expect to see this in your vendor's catalog anytime soon. Populate a typical four-CPU server with these new processors and firms will be able to exploit a 32-thread environment at bus speeds without having to leave the chassis, a source told me recently.

The availability of such an environment will turn application development on its head. For the past several years, developers have preferred to adopt the architecture-agnostic Java development environment for most of their applications. Such a strategy, however, prevents their applications from exploiting the processor's full potential.

That was a reasonable strategy when a single-core processor was a single-core processor, but with the performance capabilities of larger multi-core processors, Java isn't going to hack it. Expect to see more application development in C++ and other environments that consider the hardware they run on.

Most firms haven't even scratched the surface of how to code to such an architecture. This new environment might not break the speed of light, but it will leave current computing models puffing by the wayside.

—Rob Daly

Rob Daly is editor of Dealing with Technology and can be reached at rob.daly@incisivemedia.com.

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