One of the early trials of Clockwork’s clock synchronization technology was conducted at Nasdaq, as featured in the New York Times. In June 2018, co-founder Balaji Prabhakar spoke with Tom Fay, then SVP of Nasdaq’s Enterprise Architecture and System Engineering, about their work together leveraging Stanford-based research on self-driving networks and high precision clock synchronization.
In modern data centers the actual network OWDs are small compared to the “switch around time” of the acknowledgment at the Receiver, so RTT/2 turns out to be a poor estimate. In case there are multiple hops, as happens, for example, to the trajectory of a transaction in a Microservice System, the OWD of each leg can be precisely determined.
How does Clockwork help our customers reduce time to resolution? By providing insight into the precise one-way delay (OWD) across complex networks instead of using round-trip time (RTT) so teams spend less time identifying where the problem is, and focus on fixing it instead. Here’s a quick video using global trading operations as an example.
As a user, you notice when your application is lagging, and it’s frustrating. As a network engineer, this lag — network latency — is cause for investigation and resolution. Network latency is how long it takes a packet of data to reach its destination. It is typically measured in round-trip time (RTT) from the sender to the receiver and back, and includes additional delays like propagation delay, processing delay, queuing delay, and encoding delay. Plus, network congestion can add a dynamic element.
Clockwork Systems was founded in 2018 by Stanford University researchers and experienced tech entrepreneurs, based on protocols developed at Stanford. Here’s a synopsis of the original paper and presentation that inspired the company.
Yes, we agree. It is time for a change. We loved our old name, but we were drowned out by the gorilla in the room who couldn’t spell….
Check out this article about Nasdaq using our product in the New York Times: Time Split to the Nanosecond is Precisely What Wall Street Wants
It can be easy to forget or take for granted, but the millions of computer servers and billions of connected devices we depend on for so many of our routine activities rely on precise timing and onboard clocks. These onboard clocks have to synchronize with a reference clock over a network in order to help the apps we regularly use to function properly, without hiccups. The need for time synchronization is a decades-old challenge that predates the Internet and has a long history in fields like radio broadcasting and telecommunications. But the advent of distributed computing and networking and a […]