Living Without Atomic Clocks

Re:Living Without Atomic Clocks by NeutronBoy on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @08:05PM (#11122902)

> My idea was a dedicated, battery-backed piece of hardware that reliably stored time plus could sync other machines. Plugs into an interconnect with ultra-low latency. One for each datacenter.

Google have a variant on this, where they use a GPS receiver in each data centre to provide an accurate time source for local machines.

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Re:Living Without Atomic Clocks by dingo_bat on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @08:43PM (#11123073)

I've seen this being used extensively in sensor control centers (power grid/power plants), so it's definitely not limited to Google.

Basically by accurate and precise timing, they are able to reconstruct and pinpoint the origin of a failure.

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Re:Living Without Atomic Clocks by nickpsecurity on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @09:03PM (#11123150)

No, they use a GPS with 7ms time spread for servers as you said. What Im describing is a custom device set against an atomic clock to nano or microsecond accuracy which then does the same to the servers via low latency interconnects. Optionally with time server & dedicated networks for reduced admin overhead.

Should do a lot better than 7ms with performance implications.

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Re:Living Without Atomic Clocks by packetslave on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @11:08PM (#11123667)

It's actually a mix of GPS and atomic clocks for diversity. See the Spanner paper section on TrueTime for details

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