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White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems

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Re: White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you don't understand how something can work doesn't make it ludicrous. People like you are hell bent on destroying what's left of the Earth by turning it into a computer. If we left progress to those without an imagination, we wouldn't even have had a working calculator.

That might be true if the proponents had an argument of any sort in support of their plan, other than "we need idiots to give us money".

You misused a comma; it doesn't belong where you used it.

Just because there are ninety nine ways to do something wrong doesn't mean there couldn't exist one way to do it right. In the case of space datacenters, there absolutely exists a way to do it effectively. Dumb VCs will never know the difference.

Re: White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems

#52

What is significance of this?

Distributed systems spend most of their effort on one problem: agreeing on the order of events across machines. Without synchronized physical clocks you have two options. Logical clocks (Lamport, vector) give you causal order but not wall-clock truth, so you can’t answer “did A really happen before B” for events that don’t have a happens-before relationship. Or you run consensus, which gives total order but costs rou…

In other words you can use time as your TX id, add MVCC and now you can transactionally read data from multiple partitions/shards. In a traditional distributed DBMS it would require a global tx manager creating a bottleneck. Did I get it right?
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