The Leap Second Paranoia (aka, All Hands on Deck)

Anthony looks at tomorrow's Leap Second to see if the financial markets will come crumbling down.

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Anthony Malakian, US Editor, Waters and WatersTechnology.com

If you're a regular reader of this column, then you know that my dad used to build and run data centers. Prior to 2000, he would come home from work and bang on about how Y2K preparations were taking up all of his time. I would tell him that I found his stories about being in the Marines far more entertaining.

Well, my dad is long retired, but Y2K's little brother ─ The Leap Second ─ is about to strike the markets tomorrow.

The Leap Second has been around since 1972 and on 25 separate occasions, a single second has been added at midnight to the Greenwich Mean Time to keep the world's atomic clock in line with the Earth's rotational spin, as the Earth is ever-so-slightly slowing down.

My favorite headline came from the venerable Washington Post: "On Tuesday, the world gets a ‘leap' second. Are we all gonna die?" I'm pretty sure the answer was "yes", so I just decided to go to the bar and drink my sorrows away rather than read the article. (Actually, it's a good read. I recommend checking it out. Perhaps at the pub.)

Previous iterations of the Leap Second have been added on weekends or holidays, but for the first time this second will be added during the trading day. As a result, exchanges, clearing houses, trading firms and platform providers have been prepping for the big day for at least the last few months, if not longer.

If you work in IT and you're just hearing about the Leap Second now, well there's not really much that can be done other than hold your breath and hope.

Words like "havoc", "chaos", "nightmare" and "Armageddon" ─ I might've made one of those up for effect ─ have been tagged to that pesky 23:59:60 timestamp for years. In 2012, websites for Qantas, Reddit, Gawker Media and Mozilla were affected. In 2009, IT giants Sun Microsystems and Oracle were jolted.

So rest assured, it's almost guaranteed that at least a few popular outlets will get hit by the Leap Second bug. The big question is, will it set Wall Street on fire?

The Preppers

If I'm being honest, I've let you, my loyal readers, down. I probably should've been looking into this long ago, but, again, in all honesty, I only heard about this Leap Second on Friday.

To get a primer on the subject I spoke with Trading Technologies' newly-minted CIO, Mike Mayhew. TT has its 7.X and TT trading platforms, and as such, they needed to make enhancements, preparations and contingency plans.

He pointed to three main areas that TT had to watch over:

1. What's the state of the current infrastructure and what will the behavior be of that infrastructure in the event of a Leap Second? This is mostly for operating systems, but that includes things like your network gear, servers and storage devices.

2. What are the dependencies among application components within TT's own time domain, what are the interdependencies between various applications, and how will they react if they get out of sync by a second?

3. Then there is the inter-time-domain dependencies, which come into play with the exchanges. If TT connects to all of these exchanges and normalize them into our one single domain, what's the impact there if we're off by a second?

For tomorrow, much was also learned and improved upon from the 2012 Leap Second, the CIO told me.

"In 2012 the Leap Second exposed a number of bugs in various operating systems," Mayhew said. "These bugs resulted in lockouts or crashes of websites, particularly with Linux systems. A lot of these bugs have been patched, so what we've done is taken that and made sure to talk to our various vendors to make sure that we're on the latest patches and have an understanding of how their systems will handle the Leap Second. It's an extended audit of pretty much every device in both of our networks to understand how they behave. The other part of that is patching up to a level where we hope that they'll behave in a way that the vendors describe."

Mayhew's team also had to make sure that their timing protocols (NTP in the 7.X platform, PTP in the TT platform) have a consistent behavior so that when the Leap Second occurs, there won't be any disruptions.

Hold Your Breath

TT has been working on these checks for a while now and Mayhew is confident that the platforms will perform in lock-step with the changeover. He adds, though, that it will be "all hands on deck" to make sure that none of TT's clients are affected when using the 7.X or TT platforms.

If you work in IT and you're just hearing about the Leap Second now, well there's not really much that can be done other than hold your breath and hope. But each Leap Second offers examples as to how the technology world can better prepare for the next Leap Second, even though there are "plots to kill the leap second."

As best I can tell, every market from the US to Asia has made plans to either halt trading during the leap second, or add the timestamp at a later time.

This is one of those things that serves as a massive time-suck for IT departments and a whole lot of anxiety. Will it be much ado about nothing? We'll find out. As for me, I'll be hanging out with my Doomsday Prepper friends.

Some Random Thoughts

* Why read about the Leap Second from me, when you can watch comedian John Oliver describe it for you. Or even better, go to this site that Oliver created to waste one second of your time.

* Are any of my readers rich and want to help make a video game? If so, please contribute to this Kickstarter to help Yu Suzuki make Shenmue 3. I need this to happen, guys. I still remember the day of the incident...the day that it snowed. I need finality.

* Speaking of need...need a little cute in your day? How about a time-lapse video of two puppies running to the food over the course of nine months?

* Since I know many of you are fans of the New York Yankees, how did you like your first dose of Carlos Correa this weekend? Get used to it...he's only 20 years old. 

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