alt Hacker NewsI highly recommend anyone to look up how PTP works and how it compares to NTP. Clock sync is very interesting. When I joined an HFT company, first thing I did was understand this stuff. We care about it a lot[1].
If you want a specific question to answer, answer this: why does PTP need hardware timestamping to achieve high precision (where the network card itself assigns timestamps to packets, rather than having the kernel do it as part of TCP/IP processing)? If we use software timestamps, why can we do microsecond precision at best? If you understand this, it goes a very long way to understanding the core ideas behind precise clock sync.
Once you have a solid understanding of PTP, look into White Rabbit. They’re able to sync two clocks with sub-ns precision. In case that isn’t obvious, that is absolutely insane.
[1] So do a lot of people. For example audio engineers. Once, an audio engineer absolutely talked my ear off about ptp. I had no idea that audio people understood clock sync so well but they do!
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Not just audio, anybody in the live events / production space needs all equipment marching in lock step.
I find time accuracy to be ridiculously interesting, and I have had to talk myself out of buying those a used atomic clock to play with [1]. I think precision time is very cool, and a small part of me wants to create the most overly engineered wall-clock using a Raspberry Pi or something to have sub-microsecond level accuracy.
Sadly, they're generally just a bit too expensive for me to justify it as a toy.
I don't work in trading (though not for lack of trying on my end), so most of the stuff I work on has been a lot more about "logical clocks", which are cool in their own right, but I have always wondered how much more efficient we could be if we had nanosecond-level precision to guarantee that locks are almost always uncontested.
[1] I'm not talking about those clocks that radio to Colorado or Greenwich, I mean the relatively small ones that you can buy that run locally.
The Wikipedia article has a good summary:
> So do a lot of people. For example audio engineers.
Indeed. PTP (various, not-necessarily compatible, versions) is at the core of modern ethernet-based audio networking: Dante (proprietary, PTP: IEEE 1588 v1), AVB (IEEE standard, PTP: 802.1AS), AES67 (AES standard, PTP: IEEE 1588 v2). And now the scope of the AVB protocol stack has been expanded to TSN for industrial and automotive time sensitive network applications.