Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
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Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
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Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#2Interesting. CERN has white rabbit for sub-ns timing. Needs special hardware but is now IEEE 1588 (PTP) "High Accuracy" profile.
I wonder how this deals with the numerous retimers and DSPs required for really high speed ethernet.
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#3Google Cloud Spanner uses atomic clocks to be able to synchronize using timestamps across distributed DBs. CockroachDB does not require atomic clocks, but I believe there is an "atomic clock mode" available. This approach sounds like it doesn't use atomic clocks, but instead just machine learning algorithms to detect offsets.
Would like to understand if the founders consider their approach to be a viable alternative to "atomic clock mode", but without actual atomic clocks.
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#4[deleted]
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#5Interesting. CERN has white rabbit for sub-ns timing. Needs special hardware but is now IEEE 1588 (PTP) "High Accuracy" profile. I wonder how this deals with the numerous retimers and DSPs required for really high speed ethernet.
I’ve been working on fairly large scale broadcast television back-end systems which have been using 10/25/100G SMPTE 2110 IP for video flows instead of HD-SDI, and those have been timed with PTP for a while (SMPTE 2059-2 standard, which is a PTP profile).
The GPS locked master clocks are custom hardware (ex: https://evertz.com/products/5700MSC-IP), but a lot of the edge devices like the video playout servers are standard X86 hardware with Ubuntu Linux, with PTP delivered in-band over the 10G/25G ports to the device (same link as the video/audio flows).
(… Which I realize is not as accurate as the newer White Rabbit related PTP update you refer to - but still odd that the original article referenced NTP and not even regular PTP which has been in use for a while and seems pretty close to their claims even before the more recent enhancements)
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#6> “Currently, nobody uses time except for maybe Spanner at Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things,” Rosenblum said. “We believe that there’s a lot more places, especially as more and more time-critical things came up. We can do time sync, since we figured out how to do that pretty well. And so we asked: is this part of a trend where we’re going to start programming these systems differently? And [researchers] got kind of excited about that possibility of us being able to pull this off.”
Who gave this guy who's apparently never heard of kerberos, ceph, SAML, or any other technology the rights to interview? Sure, their windows are larger, but "nobody uses time" is so clueless it blows the mind, and it's hard to imagine who decided that "NTP, but machine learning" is a $21M idea
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#7[deleted]
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#8> “Currently, nobody uses time except for maybe Spanner at Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things,” Rosenblum said. “We believe that there’s a lot more places, especially as more and more time-critical things came up. We can do time sync, since we figured out how to do that pretty well. And so we asked: is this part of a trend where we’re going to start programming these systems differently? And [resear…
Yup. Going back to the principles of distributed systems, I’m really wondering how “NTP but machine learning” can be used to minimize the clock skew to hundreds of nanoseconds with software only. The RTT between two servers can vary a lot — and way past the calculated minimum RTT.
The figures (eg $21M) and names dropped (eg Stanford) are an appeal to authority, which does make me curious.
I’d love to see some papers, I went through all of Balaji Prabhakar‘s publications (titles only), and didn’t see a single paper that sounded like “NTP but machine learning.
If anyone else knows more about this, I’d love to hear from you. Surely $21M doesn’t get dropped with at least someone doing due dill on the tech?
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#9> “Currently, nobody uses time except for maybe Spanner at Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things,” Rosenblum said. “We believe that there’s a lot more places, especially as more and more time-critical things came up. We can do time sync, since we figured out how to do that pretty well. And so we asked: is this part of a trend where we’re going to start programming these systems differently? And [resear…
None of the services you mentioned need even close to nanosecond precision between servers to operate. Applications that do (other than the ones in the article like Spanner) are concentrated in supercomputing/scientific computing and spend a LOT of money on the problem. So yeah if you are letting your clocks drift by multiple seconds you aren't "using time" in any real sense.
If these folks can achieve what they want at a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than current prices then you are absolutely going to see a lot more regular use cases show up to take advantage of it.
Re: Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync
#10> “Currently, nobody uses time except for maybe Spanner at Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things,” Rosenblum said. “We believe that there’s a lot more places, especially as more and more time-critical things came up. We can do time sync, since we figured out how to do that pretty well. And so we asked: is this part of a trend where we’re going to start programming these systems differently? And [resear…
Reminds me of early in my career where I encountered a home made time sync system because the creator had never heard of NTP.