3 ms·
Spanner is quite impressive and I remember wondering if any of the cloud hosting companies would attempt to match it. The problem of synchronizing atomic clock
by smoyer 14y ago
Spanner is quite impressive and I remember wondering if any of the cloud hosting companies would attempt to match it. The problem of synchronizing atomic clocks and GPS is itself not trivial (remember the faster-than-light photons at CERN?), but there are plenty of other challenges too.
- Evbn 14y agoWell the CERN clocks were operating at a much lower error tolerance than Spanner's 5ms.
- rdtsc 14y agoIt seems this becomes another tune-able parameter. The concurrent transactional behavior just depends on the characteristics of the time synchronization. This also, unfortunately introduces a new failure mode ("bird pooped on GPS antenna" exception) that has to be handled. At worst it would revert to using plain NTP servers. But is just something new that possibly didn't have to be considered previously.
- cmccabe 14y agoIf GPS is unavailable, it reverts to using atomic clocks. As those gradually drift out of sync, the system slows down until the problem is fixed. NTP is not used, at least in Spanner.