What are those applications? They've passed me by unless that's meant to cover large-scale physics measurements of some sort. I don't understand how it would even make sense in mainstream supercomputers. It should be good to synchronize OS scheduling in HPC nodes to minimize jitter in tightly-coupled applications, but that's not ns stuff and I haven't come across it actually being done (though Bull had some support as free software).

I don't see how something like Kerberos or TOTP, that fails without some sort of synchonization, can be defined as not "using time" in a real sense. (If cluster nodes were drifting by seconds, I'd be checking them, even if that was only going to affect something like make.)