On hardware
Smaller is better
I’ve compacted our hardware from a 4U chassis down to 2U. This is huge progress as we can now get about 20ish servers in a rack.
Our water-cooled servers are now also running AMD Ryzen 9 series chips, along with Intel. We’ve made our OS builds slightly faster (by about 30 seconds) with our latest designs.
All our PSUs are highly redundant in our servers. Work is still in progress on improving PSU airflow in the hosts, as the current power boards are not modular and add turbulent drag, which affects cooling. I have been working with the chassis manufacturer and OEMs to find a more laminar solution and will be back on the tools Monday when a parts shipment from Memphis arrives.
The stage is set
I’ve also worked hard on deploying console.stage.corelatency.com and have been giving access to friends. As a bare metal cloud, this is hard, and I want people with trials to enjoy real, fully-featured servers, so…
We’re buying more hardware!
I’ve placed an order for five more chassis in the 2U format from my Utah manufacturer. This is so we can give trial tenant logins to some of the interested investment managers who are waiting to get hands-on. We’ll have seven boxes in total.
IPv6 is live as well
Building a fully automated, bare metal cloud network was the hardest engineering challenge we faced on the software side. Let’s throw in IPv6!
That’s a real server in the lab. Each host network gets a /96 PD block and a /128 host address, from the /64 VPC that the server sits in. This is not too dissimilar to how you get an IPv4 address. You buy a block of addresses from us, like a /29, and we set the first one as the SVI router, and then you have 5 usable ones.
I’m very glad this works. I don’t want someone making HasCoreLatencyEnabledIPv6Yet.com… see Exhibit A: https://www.HaveVirginMediaEnabledIPv6Yet.co.uk/.
On investment journey
We continue to see strong interest in our company and I am enjoying chatting to some great VC funds for our seed raise.
If you are an investor looking for an opportunity in a venture that is long tech but an AI hedge (in my view, the space is too crowded), please speak to us, at investors@corelatency.com. Our platform has proven interest from a top investment bank and multiple hedge funds, and we have a very exciting path ahead on becoming the ultimate low latency cloud platform for quant finance.
This week’s thanks
Szymon Kopyciński (https://github.com/szykopyc), a market data engineer at a systematic fund, has been great help this week and did a lot of painful testing for SSH, console user journeys, Office 365 stuff and most importantly, performance testing of these incredible servers. Thank you!
PS
- This blog is nowhere near as polished as blog.abctaylor.com was – I don’t have the time to write like that. I still think if you are early or mid career, a techy blog or homelab is such a great thing to show employers, and when we hire, this is certainly something we will hold in high regard.
- I hate I need to say this in 2026 but none of my posts, or future posts written by staff in our blogs, will be AI-written. The only touch-ups here remains my image editing. We are an authentic business, and also embrace AI well in our engineering, but AI writing is not authentic, and generally stinks.