Most people, whether they are mobile phones, laptops, or network servers, may not understand how long the device has been in use. In most cases, time management is an esoteric chore and is handled by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. These devices served their purpose, but a few engineers at Facebook decided they needed a better way. So they built a new, more precise time management device that adapts to PCI Express (PCIe) cards and contributed to the Open Compute project. As an open source project ..

Facebook production engineer Oleg Obleukhov says that at a basic level he is pinging this timing server to make sure every device is reporting at the same time. “Almost every electronic device today uses Network Time Synchronization Protocol (NTP), which is ubiquitous in phones, watches, laptops, and they all connect to these NTP servers and say ‘what time’. to say. The NTP server therefore provides the time, ”he explained.

Before Facebook developed a new way of doing this, there were basically two ways to check the time. The developers reportedly used something like Facebook.com as a time-checking mechanism, but big companies like Facebook needed something that worked even when they weren’t connected to the internet. .. The company that manages the data center has a hardware device called Stratum One. It’s a big box inside the data center that has no other job than to act as a timekeeper.

These timing boxes have been made by a small number of companies over the years, so they were sturdy and functional, but new features were difficult to get. Additionally, companies like Facebook couldn’t control the box due to its unique nature. Obleukhov and his fellow researcher Ahmad Byagowi are looking for ways to create these devices by building PCIe cards with out of the box components that can be connected to PCs with open slots. I started to attack the problem.

They literally drew their first design on the iPad and started incorporating that vision into their prototypes. Time-based devices are based on two key components: GNSS receivers and so-called highly stable oscillators. Blog post explaining the project, Obleukhov and Byagowi explained the role of these two parties.

“It all starts with a GNSS receiver that provides the time (ToD) and 1 pulse / sec (PPS). If the receiver is supported by a very stable oscillator (for example, an atomic clock or a furnace controlled crystal oscillator). , It can provide precise time to nanosecond. The time is distributed over the entire network via commercial network cards, ”write the two engineers.

It all sounds pretty basic, but it’s actually very complicated, and maybe it’s just accepting that the method of determining the current time worked fine, and the problem that way. That’s why I never thought of attacking. However, these two Facebook engineers fell prey to the limits of these approaches and decided to build something better on their own.

“A lot of it comes from frustration. We were frustrated with everything on the market. Security features, etc. to keep things different and monitor what was going on. I needed a specific feature of, and we still had to ask the seller [for these new features] Anytime a request takes 6 months to a year [it wouldn’t be exactly what we wanted] And we had to change things all the time, so basically we had to build it from scratch like that, ”Obleukhov said.

One of the things that made it possible to mount a timing device on a PCIe card was the advancement of the miniaturization of atomic clocks / oscillators. Therefore, by combining the moment of their frustration with the current capabilities of technology, they realized that they could do it on their own if they focused on the task.

When the design started to fall into place, the engineer decided to be flexible enough to allow the engineer to do the basic design and remove the components that meet his needs. You might need some very fancy and expensive parts, but depending on your needs, you may want to use parts that are much cheaper.

We also decided early on to involve the Open Compute project so that the design process could be open source and other companies and engineers could contribute to the design. “In fact, I had planned to be open source from the start because I needed the support of the community. I didn’t want to have a single project in-house, so I lost interest, or the company was interested. Think about what you have lost. [it could go away].. I wanted that [keep going] Independently [of what happened]Said Obroyhoff.

Today, the project involves 12 suppliers, including those designed by these engineers. But the goal is to keep improving the design, and by making it open source, the community of companies and engineers involved will continue to improve it.