Facebook engineers develop new open source time keeping appliance

guest · Aug 11, 2021

Facebook engineers develop new open source time keeping appliance
August 11, 2021
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/11/facebook-engineers-develop-new-open-source-time-keeping-appliance/

Most people probably don’t realize just how much our devices are time driven, whether it’s your phone, your laptop or a network server.

For the most part, time keeping has been an esoteric chore, taken care of by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. While these devices served their purpose, a couple of Facebook engineers decided there had to be a better way. So they built a new more accurate time keeping device that fits on a PCI Express (PCIe) card, and contributed it to the Open Compute Project as an open source project.

At a basic level, says Oleg Obleukhov, a production engineer at Facebook, it’s simply pinging this time-keeping server to make sure each device is reporting the same time. “Almost every single electronic device today uses NTP — Network Time Synchronization Protocol — which you have on your phone, on your watch, on your laptop, everywhere, and they all connect to these NTP servers where they just go and say, ‘what time is it’ and the NTP server provides the time,” he explained.
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Companies running data centers have a hardware device called Stratum One, which is a big box that sits in the data center, and has no other job than acting as the time keeper.
Because these time-keeping boxes were built by a handful of companies over years, they were solid and worked, but it was hard to get new features.

Obleukhov and his colleague research scientist, Ahmad Byagowi began to attack the problem by looking for a way to create these devices by building a PCIe card with off-the-shelf parts that you could stick into any PC with an open slot.
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Facebook: Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance

Facebook engineers have built and open-sourced an Open Compute Time Appliance, an important component of the modern timing infrastructure.

To make this possible, we came up with the Time Card — a PCI Express (PCIe) card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance.

With the help of the OCP community, we established the Open Compute Time Appliance Project and open-sourced every aspect of the Open Time Server.

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Many companies rely on public NTP pools such as time.facebook.com to act as their Stratum 1. However, this approach has its drawbacks.

To remove these dependencies, we’ve built a new dedicated piece of hardware called Time Appliance, which consists of a GNSS receiver and a miniaturized atomic clock (MAC). Users of time appliances can keep accurate time, even in the event of GNSS connectivity loss. While building our Time Appliance, we also invented a Time Card, a PCIe card that can turn any commodity server into a time appliance.
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Under the OCP umbrella, we open-sourced at the Time Appliance Project GitHub repository, including the specs, schematics, mechanics, BOM, and the source code. Now, as long as printing the PCB and soldering tiny components does not sound scary, anyone can build their own Time Card for a fraction of the cost of a regular time appliance.

We published an Open Time Server spec at www.opentimeserver.com, which explains in great detail how to combine the hardware (Time Card, Network Card, and a commodity server) and the software (OS driver, NTP, and/or PTP server) to build the Time Appliance.
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Bill_Bright · Aug 12, 2021

Having an open-source (non-proprietary) time keeper device is nice but it really doesn't affect anyone, except organizations that have multiple, geographically separate facilities AND a need to access the same documents and databases. Keeping diverse networks and connected devices in sync is important to ensure database change requests, for example, that come in from different parts of the world are applied to that database in the correct chronological order. I get that.

But normal home users (whose Windows machines timesync weekly by default to either time.nist.gov or time.windows.com) don't need such a time keeper, nor do companies (even big ones) where all their employees connect to the same network, don't need such a time keeper either.

The military sure does - but not likely they want one developed by Facebook - a company known for their great security and privacy policies!

Telecommunications companies need a time-keeper but most likely they have one in place, like that Stratum One mentioned in the article. Since their purpose is simply and solely to keep accurate time across an organization's global network, and as mentioned, they are "solid and worked", I just can't see what "new features" (that might compromise that reliability) anyone would want added.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. And KISS (keep it simple, stupid) seem to apply here. It seems to me, as someone who supported major, global government and corporate networks for many years, and as one who understands the importance of time synchronization across those networks, I would just leave such devices alone and let them do the jobs they do so well. If some new "feature" is needed, do it with another, separate device attached to the network, or as an added app on a networked server.

JMVHO

BTW, if you want to make sure your computer is set to the correct time, a great little site is Time.is.

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Facebook engineers develop new open source time keeping appliance

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