Time Appliances Project
Welcome
- Welcome to the OCP Time Appliances Project wiki.
- This Project is open to the public and we welcome all those who would like to be involved.
- Time is a key element to get the highest efficiency in a distributed system. The performance of a distributed system depends on the synchronization of its elements. Several industries such as telecom, mobile, power, industrial, professional audio and video and many more have embraced the need for highly accurate and more importantly reliable distribution and synchronization of time and frequency across packet networks. Although the use case scenario for each of the industries is different, they all share one common thing and that is, time synchronization. Since there is a diverse need for time synchronization across different industries, driven from different use cases and applications, managing the needs of this industry chain becomes a challenge.
Time Appliances Project (TAP) aims to provide a platform to bring together, discuss, standardize and share technologies and solutions across industries with the datacenter applications and datacenter network infrastructure as the main interest. The project aims to bring together the community of datacenter operators, application developers, and equipment and semiconductor companies together to enable datacenter time-sensitive applications such as consistency in distributed systems, edge computing, AR/VR and IoT. These applications will greatly benefit from high accuracy, reliable, and scalable distribution and synchronization of time.
IEEE 1588 Precision Timing Protocol (PTP) and other synchronization methods have been adopted by various industries to maximize the efficiency of various distributed system use cases. Each use case scenario comes with a set of requirements and configurations. These configurations are collected as a ‘PTP profile’. Time appliances project aims to support the development of a PTP profile for datacenter applications and datacenter network infrastructure. The profile will cover time-sensitive applications over OCP-compliant and PTP-aware networking infrastructure such as network switches, network clocks, network interface cards, timing modules & connectors, etc. Additionally, the profile will address various requirements for high accuracy and reliable distribution and synchronization of time, such as expected performance, networking, software API, data models, deployment and telemetry. The project also aims at openness and interoperability through the use of open-source PTP software implementations for timing appliances.
Datacenter applications are the primary target of time appliances project. In addition, the project extends to related topics on time synchronization in academia, research and other industries. The time appliances project brings together the community and will be highly collaborative through technical meetings and collaboration with other OCP Projects including the Networking, Storage, Server, and Telco Projects.
- Disclaimer: Please do not submit any confidential information to the Project Community. All presentation materials, proposals, meeting minutes and/or supporting documents are published by OCP and are open to the public in accordance to OCP's Bylaws and IP Policy. This can be found on the OCP OCP Policies page. If you have any questions please contact OCP.
Mission Statement
- 1. Create specifications and references for Data Center Timing appliances, applications and networking infrastructure
- 2. Promote openness in Timing Appliances and interfaces through open-source implementations
Project Leadership
- - Lead: Ahmad Byagowi, Ph.D. (OCP TAP / Facebook)
- - Incubation Committee: Elad Wind (OCP / NVIDIA)
Workstreams
| Project | Objective | POC | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Open Time Server | Development of an open time server for DC and Edge systems | Oleg Obleukhov & Dotan Levi |
Submitted |
| #2 | Data Center PTP Profile | Development of a PTP Profile tailored for data center applications | Michel Ouellette | Submitted |
| #3 | Precision Time APIs | Time APIs to disseminate the time error (error bound) and bring accurate time to the user space | Georgi Chalakov | Work in progress |
| #4 | Oscillators | Classification and measuring of oscillators | Gary Giust | Submitted |
| #5 | PTP Servos | Design and Implement Advanced PTP Servos | Alon Regev | Getting Started |
| #6 | Instrumentation and Measurement | Open source instrumentation and measurement/testing tools for PTP | Anand Ram & Julian St. James |
Work in progress |
| #7 | Time Sync Reliability | Fault-tolerance and UTC-traceability | Gautam Kumar & Yuliang Li |
Getting Started |
Get Involved
Documents
| Worstream | Name | Format | Version | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Open Time Server | Reference Architecture | v1 | July 28, 2021 |
| Time Card | Spec and design package | v1 | July 28, 2021 | |
| TAP Software | Software | July 28, 2021 | ||
| #2 | Data Center PTP Profile | Spec | v1 | August 31, 2021 |
Regular Project Calls
- - Wednesdays at 11am PST, starting on July 15th, 2020. Repeats every 2 weeks following that
Join the meeting from your computer, tablet or smartphone:
https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/565185493
Dial in:
United States (Toll Free): +1 877 309 2073 United States: +1 571 317-3129 Access Code: 565-185-493
Upcoming Calls
| Date | Topics | Speakers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| #45 | Apr-20, 2022 | T.B.D. | Dan Biederman |
| #44 | Apr-06, 2022 | T.B.D. | Petre Minciunescu, Ph.D. |
| #43 | Mar-23, 2022 | Open Time Card FPGA | Sven Meier & Thomas Schaub |
| #42 | Mar-09, 2022 | Measuring and Monitoring Options for Time Sync Infrastructures | Heiko Gerstung |
Recordings from Past Calls
Presentations & Videos
2021 OCP Global Summit
| PTP @ Scale: Learning from FB’s Journey | Dotan Levi | Video | |
| Introducing Open Time Server | Elad Wind, Julian St. James | Video | |
| Precision Time Protocol Profile for Data Center Applications & Related Network Requirements | Thomas Kernen, Michel Ouellette | Video | |
| Specifying Oscillator Holdover for Data Centers | Gary Giust, Nazariy Tshchynskyy | Video | |
| Fault-tolerance for PTP | Gautam Kumar, Yuliang Li | Video | |
| Throughput Improvements of Hyperscaled Distributed Databases based on Precision Timing | Georgi Chalakov | Video | |
| Challenges and Solutions in PTP Based Time Sync in Hyper-Scale Data Centers | Amit Oren | Video | |
| Boundary Clocks vs Transparent Clocks in Hyperscale Network | Rohit Puri | Video |
GTC 2021
IC Presentations
- - September 2nd 2021 IC Presentation (Contribution of TAP DC Profile)
- - August 5th, 2021 IC Presentation (Contribution of TAP Time Card and Open Time Server)
2020 OCP Tech Week
| Kickoff | Video | Slides |
| Synchronized Data Centers - Why Bother? | Video | Slides |
| Hardware Timestamping Revolution (Alternatives to Vanilla PTP) | Video | Slides |
| Measurement and Testing Challenges in Data Centers | Video | Part 1 Part 2 |
| Data Center PTP Profile | Video | Slides |
| Open Source Time Server (Grandmaster) | Video | Slides |
| Tech Demo - Open Source Time Server (Grandmaster) | Video | Slides |
- - Impact of Oscillator Noise on PTP Time Error – Part 1
- - Impact of Oscillator Noise on PTP Time Error – Part 2
TAP Media References
- - "Why is this PCIe Card RADIOACTIVE?" video from Linus Tech Tips Youtube Channel highlighting the TAP Time Card
- - "The most accurate Raspberry Pi clock IN THE WORLD! Can it do PTP?" video from Jeff Geerling Youtube Channel highlighting the TAP Time Card
- - "Put An Atomic Clock in Your PC - Open Source Time Card" video from Gary Explains Youtube Channel explains the TAP Time Card
- - "Facebook shares its Time Card atomic clock tech to speed internet services" article from C|Net
- - "Supercharges Precision Timing for Facebook’s Next-Generation Time Keeping" developer blog from NVIDIA
References & External Links
- - Spanner, TrueTime & The CAP Theorem by Eric Brewer, Google
- - Sundial: Fault-tolerant Clock Synchronization for Datacenters by Google Inc. and Harvard University
- - Practical Uses of Synchronized Clocks in Distributed Systems by Barbara Liskov
- - Stanford Paper
- - On Time Synchronization Issues in Time-Sensitive Networks with Regulators and Nonideal Clocks
- - Accurate Network Clock Synchronization at Scale
- - Exploiting a Natural Network Effect for Scalable, Fine-grained Clock Synchronization
- - SIMON: A Simple and Scalable Method for Sensing, Inference and Measurement in Data Center Networks
- - New Guidelines for Inclusiveness