This reminds me of how Google uses atomic clock and GPS for Spanner [1]<p>Google:
"“We can commit data at two different locations — say the West Coast [of the United States] and Europe — and still have some agreed upon ordering between them,” Fikes says, “So, if the West Coast write happens first and then the one in Europe happens, the whole system knows that — and there’s no possibility of them being viewed in a different order.”"<p>Renaissance Technology:
"Replete with schematic drawings, the filing describes a novel way for “executing synchronized trades in multiple exchanges.” The invention consists of not only sophisticated algorithms and a host of computer servers, but atomic clocks -- precisely calibrated to vibrations of irradiated cesium atoms -- to sync orders to within a few billionths of a second."<p>To translate what Renaissance is doing in technical parallel, they are trying to do a synchronous commit at multiple locations/exchanges at the same time. Submitting a trade to an exchange can be viewed similarly to committing data to a data center. By using atomic clock, synchronize these writes across multiple locations in effect eliminating HFT from jumping in.<p>If anyone is looking into prior art on this, Spanner is probably the closest I can think of. (I am not a patent attorney and don't want to turn this into a patent debate).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/26/3692392/google-spanner-atomic-clocks-GPS" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/26/3692392/google-spanner-at...</a>