Facebook Rolls Its Own High-Precision Commodity Time Servers

3 years ago thenewstack.io

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Unsatisfied with the accuracy provided by off-the-shelf time-synchronization, Facebook has created and released as open source the specifications for its own picosecond-precise time-keeping device, the Open Compute Time Appliance. It uses a PCI Express (PCIe) card to turn a commodity x86 server into an appliance for providing ultra-accurate time appliance, explained Facebook engineers Ahmad Byagowi, and Oleg Obleukhov in a blog entry posted Wednesday. The work started last year as the social media giant looked for ways to improve the timekeeping in its services. Building on the veritable Network Time Protocol, it wanted to move in accuracy from the 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds range.

If the server loses connectivity with the GNSS, the time card will continue to say stay within 1-microsecond range of accuracy for 24 hours.

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