The Thermodynamics of Trading with Daniel Pontecorvo

Daniel Pontecorvo runs the “physical engineering” team at Jane Street. This group blends architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and construction management to build functional physical spaces. In this episode, Ron and Dan go deep on the challenge of heat exchange in a datacenter, especially in the face of increasingly dense power demands—and the analogous problem of keeping traders cool at their desks. Along the way they discuss the way ML is changing the physical constraints of computing; the benefits of having physical engineering expertise in-house; the importance of monitoring; and whether you really need Apollo-style CO2 scrubbers to ensure your office gets fresh air. You can find the transcript for this episode on our website . Some links to topics that came up in the discussion: ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) Some research on CO2’s effects on human performance, which motivated us to look into CO2 Scrubbers The Open Compute Project Rail-Optimized and Rail-only network topologies. Immersion cooling , where you submerge a machine in a dielectric fluid!

You can listen to The Thermodynamics of Trading with Daniel Pontecorvo online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Thermodynamics of Trading with Daniel Pontecorvo is an episode from Signals and Threads by Jane Street.

This episode is 00:58:46 long.

This episode was published on Jul 25, 2025.

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