Globally Synchronized Time via Datacenter Networks Ki Suh Lee, Han Wang, Vishal Shrivastav, Hakim Weatherspoon Computer Science Department Cornell University kslee,hwang,vishal,
[email protected] ABSTRACT croseconds when a network is heavily congested. Synchronized time is critical to distributed systems and network applications in a datacenter network. Unfortu- CCS Concepts nately, many clock synchronization protocols in datacen- •Networks → Time synchronization protocols; Data cen- ter networks such as NTP and PTP are fundamentally lim- ter networks; •Hardware → Networking hardware; ited by the characteristics of packet switching networks. In particular, network jitter, packet buffering and schedul- 1. INTRODUCTION ing in switches, and network stack overheads add non- Synchronized clocks are essential for many network and deterministic variances to the round trip time, which must distributed applications. Importantly, an order of magnitude be accurately measured to synchronize clocks precisely. improvement in synchronized precision can improve perfor- In this paper, we present the Datacenter Time Protocol mance. For instance, if no clock differs by more than 100 (DTP), a clock synchronization protocol that does not use nanoseconds (ns) compared to 1 microsecond (us), one-way packets at all, but is able to achieve nanosecond precision. delay (OWD), which is an important metric for both net- In essence, DTP uses the physical layer of network devices work monitoring and research, can be measured precisely to implement a decentralized clock synchronization proto- due to the tight synchronization. Synchronized clocks with col. By doing so, DTP eliminates most non-deterministic 100 ns precision allow packet level scheduling of minimum elements in clock synchronization protocols. Further, DTP sized packets at a finer granularity, which can minimize con- uses control messages in the physical layer for communicat- gestion in rack-scale systems [23] and in datacenter net- ing hundreds of thousands of protocol messages without in- works [47].