3 ms·
> What about database systems which have to deal with time dilation due to running on spacecraft that travel through space at different velocities? I think the
by setr 4y ago
> What about database systems which have to deal with time dilation due to running on spacecraft that travel through space at different velocities?
I think they already handle this case by accident, because distributed clocks are unreliable and inconsistent anyways.
- devnulll 4y agoThe Big Players put atomic clocks in the datacenter, and provide multiple mechanism's of time synchronization. Google Spanner was the first to do this, back in... 2007? https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/26/3692392/google-spanner-atomic-clocks-GPS https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/26/3692392/google-spanner-a... https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-consistency https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con... Now, I don't think they worry overmuch about general or special relativity at this point, but if we start putting datacenters in orbit that will become an actual issue. I'll wager we'll start seeing Edge Compute and CDN features on the very large satellite constellations (Starlink, etc) soon. Initially this will preserve bandwidth between satellites and with the ground stations. This will be a big upsell feature. The Quant folks would pay more for those sweet low-latency links...