Downtown Data – St. Louis Revived?

Another re-post from NY Times.  Read the article “Data Centers Offer Hope for St. Louis Office Market” about reviving downtown St. Louis through the rehab of historic warehouses and department stores as data centers.

This type of project could be the next wave to sweep American downtowns, following the rough outline of pre/early 20th century dense mixed development, through white flight/car culture, slum clearing  and the highways, and New Urbanism/lifestyle centers.  St. Louis is one example of many cities with historic building stock left vacant as manufacturing or light industrial spaces with large workforces left dense urban centers for large automated factories in the cheaper suburbs and rural parts of the country.  According to the NYT article, Unisys is looking at both the turn of the century department store building in the photo, as well as an old printing press warehouse, as sites for new data centers in St. Louis.  Both would have high ceilings, and the industrial building in particular would presumably have a structure well-suited to the data center use.  This presents some real benefits to the municipality – an occupied, modernized, and maintained building downtown, at least a handful of employees with both payroll tax and the usual shopping benefits.  These facilities also tend to consume huge amounts of energy, which can be another big source of tax revenue, but also a burden on a city’s infrastructure, let alone the obvious environmental costs of powering the “cloud.”  At a base level though, it’s one way to keep the lights on inside, even if very few people are ever “home,” in these buildings.

St. Louis has some geographic advantages as a data center site too, and each city would have to inventory these as they evaluate a data center project.  Remember when it was the hub of TWA?  It’s literally in the middle of the country.  More locally, the article mentions that they have an electric grid with excess capacity – another plus.  While a lot of data center development by companies like Unisys is located in close proximity to financial and technology firms, this article cites local government offices at the target client.

If this type of development takes off, what would its resultant network look like?

Here is the start of the US telecom network:

You can view independent networks’ maps in detail at this selection of USA Longhaul Network Maps.

Will it have any relationship to the US Interstate Highway system?

…and how will it connect to the world-wide fiber-cable network, or “TeleGeography” (map from Equinix, a major  data center developer).

The ‘Flash Crash’ of May 6th – Yes, it was a Single Algorithmic Sale

In my book for Kazys Varnelis’ Network Architecture course at Columbia GSAPP, I focused on the landscape of data centers, especially those with ties to high-frequency trading and stock exchanges, in the New York City area.  One catalyst for this research was the ‘Flash Crash’ of the afternoon of May 6th where the Dow lost 600 points in minutes, and then regained it nearly as quickly.  This was due to a huge volume of algorithmic trading, redoubling the demand for regulation of high-frequency traders, and undoubtedly catching an unaware public off-guard with a troubling display of uncertainty.  Normally high-frequency traders are interested in more volatile, cheaper stocks, but this sale had two really unusual aspects which caused the crash – first it was selling futures related to the S&P 500 index itself, and it also executed its huge sale – $4.1 billion – very quickly.  Even this huge sale might not have affected the market itself, but as all the other algorithmic traders (‘black boxes’) saw this sale, a cascade of automated sell orders started.

To call these agents ‘traders’ is a stretch – these are not people but computers, all connected through fiber-optic data lines directly to the exchanges – this network is what I spent time mapping for the Fiber Finance book.  These transactions are processed in microseconds without any real human involvement.  Interestingly, once the Dow started in a downward spiral, electronic trading was stopped.  Suddenly the shouting traders at the Stock Exchange floor on Wall Street took back the exchange, to slow it down.  The NYSE building in Lower Manhattan is always represented by frantic men shouting buy and sell orders but Fort Knox might be a more appropriate image to its function as a human slowdown machine.  The fast-acting trades are happening silently in Northern New Jersey.

Read the New York Times Article: A Single Sale Worth $4.1 Billion Led to the ‘Flash Crash’

NYSE Data Center in Mahwah, NJ

Thank you again, Planet Money!  Their most recent podcast from 6/8/10

Anyone who read my Fiber Finance book for Kazys Varnelis’ Network City class knows that Mahwah is the new Wall St.  But they did a great job of keeping its location under wraps!  The Planet Money team interviewed local Mahwahns (dwellers of Mahwah – I’m happy to correct that to however it ought to read) and visited the site itself.  Conveniently, they named the street in Mahwah where the data center is located – MacArthur Blvd – and a few neighbors.  So, with the smallest time investment on Google maps, I think I can say with some confidence that the data center is at 1600 MacArthur Blvd, Mahwah, NJ.  Check out the Google street view of the building under construction too!

Final Project & Review Round-Up

My final portfolio is turned in to GSAPP.  I wasn’t able to post in the midst of the last rush to finish, so here is the recap.

Appitecture final review

(May 6)  I produced a working iPhone app!  In the last day or so leading up to the review it came together.  Based on a Wavefront OBJ importer for iPhone SDK that I found online, it loads 3d objects for viewing on the iPhone.  To make a simple augmented reality-type app, I populated a virtual space (a view in OpenGL) with a handful of objects, and overlaid it onto the iPhone camera view.  The last step was to get the compass heading and rotate the objects accordingly so that they stay in place.

Here’s a view of what it would look like:

The review was a standing jury interacting with each of our iPhone apps on working devices (the vast majority of us had working apps, and we had a bunch of iPhones and an iPad to demonstrate them).  The jury included Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams of the GSAPP Spatial Information Design Lab, and Jeannie Kim and Craig Buckley of GSAPP.  While most of the app’s were map-based, we also had a QRCode-based website, and a team who bought a brain-wave reading headset and used it as input for a visualization in Processing.  Mine was the only AR-type app.  The discussion was really interesting – I called it the PktObjct app, a way to carry virtual objects and environments with you in your pocket – and the most interesting part was thinking through what objects you might want to take in your pocket.

Mark and Toru are interesting in continuing with anyone who wants to work on their apps – I may take them up on that!  I’m also planning on helping Chris Gee with his QRCode installation at the GSAPP End of Year Show.

Curtain Wall final review

(May 10)  Advanced Curtain Walls with Bob Heintges is an amazing class.  I designed and detailed a custom unitized curtain wall system.  The main features are a slumped, tinted (colored frit) IGU on the interior, and a monolithic outer light of glass to give the curtain wall a clean, minimal exterior and provide double-skin functionality.

Network City Final Project – Fiber-Finance Book

(May 11)  Through maps, my own writing, and even transcription of an NPR Planet Money podcast, I traced the NYSE from Wall Street to Weehawken, showing the fiber optic network of New York, the data centers it connects, and the latency in-between.  This really is the face of our economy.  In the research process, I signed up at Digital Realty Trust’s website to view their white papers – they emailed me back (from 111 8th Ave!) to follow-up, presumably to help me set up my data center – awesome!  Book available at LuLu.