Time Appliances Project

Welcome

Welcome to the OCP Time Appliance Project wiki.

This Project is open to the public and we welcome all those who would like to be involved.

Time is a key element to get the highest efficiency in a distributed system. The performance of a distributed system depends on the synchronization of its elements. Several industries such as telecom, mobile, power, industrial, professional audio and video and many more have embraced the need for highly accurate and more importantly reliable distribution and synchronization of time and frequency across packet networks. Although the use case scenario for each of the industries is different, they all share one common thing and that is, time synchronization. Since there is a diverse need for time synchronization across different industries, driven from different use cases and applications, managing the needs of this industry chain becomes a challenge.

Time Appliances Project (TAP) aims to provide a platform to bring together, discuss, standardize and share technologies and solutions across industries with the datacenter applications and datacenter network infrastructure as the main interest. The project aims to bring together the community of datacenter operators, application developers, and equipment and semiconductor companies together to enable datacenter time-sensitive applications such as consistency in distributed systems, edge computing, AR/VR and IoT. These applications will greatly benefit from high accuracy, reliable, and scalable distribution and synchronization of time.

IEEE 1588 Precision Timing Protocol (PTP) and other synchronization methods have been adopted by various industries to maximize the efficiency of various distributed system use cases. Each use case scenario comes with a set of requirements and configurations. These configurations are collected as a ‘PTP profile’. Time appliances project aims to support the development of a PTP profile for datacenter applications and datacenter network infrastructure. The profile will cover time-sensitive applications over OCP-compliant and PTP-aware networking infrastructure such as network switches, network clocks, network interface cards, timing modules & connectors, etc. Additionally, the profile will address various requirements for high accuracy and reliable distribution and synchronization of time, such as expected performance, networking, software API, data models, deployment and telemetry. The project also aims at openness and interoperability through the use of open-source PTP software implementations for timing appliances.

Datacenter applications are the primary target of time appliances project. In addition, the project extends to related topics on time synchronization in academia, research and other industries. The time appliances project brings together the community and will be highly collaborative through technical meetings and collaboration with other OCP Projects including the Networking, Storage, Server, and Telco Projects.

Disclaimer: Please do not submit any confidential information to the Project Community. All presentation materials, proposals, meeting minutes and/or supporting documents are published by OCP and are open to the public in accordance to OCP's Bylaws and IP Policy. This can be found on the OCP OCP Policies page. If you have any questions please contact OCP.

Project Leadership

- Ahmad Byagowi (Lead)

- Elad Wind (Lead)

- Rajeev Sharma (Interim IC Rep)

Proposed Workstreams

Project	Objective	Point of Contact	Meeting Schedule
Edge Grandmaster	Development of a grandmaster designed for edge systems.	Dotan Levi	discussed during project call
DC Profile	Development of a profile tailored for data center needs	Michel Ouellette	discussed during project call
Open Source Grandmaster	Development of an open source grandmaster	Oleg Obleukhov	discussed during project call
Precision Time API	Development of necessary APIs to disseminate the time error (error bound) and bring accurate time to the user space.	Georgi Chalakov	discussed during project call
Overall	Project meeting coordinator	Kelvin Chukwu	please send all inquiries to Kelvin

Get Involved

- TAP Mailing List

- OCP Projects Calendar

TAP GitHub

- Github Repo

Regular Project Calls

- Wednesdays at 11am PST, starting on July 15th, 2020. Repeats every 2 wks following that. Please contact Kelvin Chukwu to propose any agenda items.

- Please join the meeting from your computer, tablet or smartphone. https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/565185493

You can also dial in using your phone.

United States (Toll Free): +1 877 309 2073                                        
United States:             +1 571 317-3129                                        
Access Code:                565-185-493

Recordings from Past Calls

- July 15th, 2020

Presentations & Videos

- TAP Presentation

- Stanford Paper for Reference Only by Hesham