How to Have Your Causality and Wall Clocks, Too

Explore the intricacies of time synchronization in distributed systems through this conference talk from Strange Loop. Delve into the concept of distributed monotonic clocks (DMC) and their ability to reflect causality while maintaining a connection to wall clock time. Learn about the challenges of perfect clock synchronization and the limitations of logical timestamp schemes. Discover how DMCs improve upon hybrid logical clock proposals by incorporating operational hooks and mechanisms to prevent clock drift. Examine the implementation of DMCs as a "piggyback protocol" suitable for transport in existing application messages, such as HTTP headers. Gain insights into a novel coordination protocol designed for ad-hoc clusters formed by Internet-attached devices. Presented by Jon Moore, a Senior Fellow at Comcast Cable, this 42-minute talk covers topics including NTP, interface challenges, population protocols, system clocks, hierarchy, recursion, visualization, convergence time, clock offsets, payload size, and more.