Time Appliances Project

Welcome

Welcome to the OCP Time Appliances 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

Co-leads:

- Ahmad Byagowi (Facebook)

- Elad Wind (NVIDIA)

Interim IC Rep:

- Rajeev Sharma (OCP)

Proposed Workstreams

Project	Objective	POC	Meeting Schedule
Open Source Grandmaster	Development of an open source grandmaster for DC and Edge systems	Oleg Obleukhov & Dotan Levi	discussed during project call
DC Profile	Development of a profile tailored for data center needs	Michel Ouellette	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

Documents

Release Candidates (RC) Docs

Name	Format	Version	Date	Contributor	Link
Open Source Grandmaster	PDF	v0.1	Sep-02, 2020	OCP TAP	Download

TAP GitHub

- Github Repo

TAP Google Drive

- Google Drive Document Repository

Regular Project Calls

- Wednesdays at 11am PST, starting on July 15th, 2020. Repeats every 2 weeks following that

- Please contact Kelvin Chukwu to propose any agenda items

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

Dial in:

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

Recordings from Past Calls

- #4 August 26th, 2020

- #3 August 12th, 2020

- #2 July 29th, 2020

- #1 July 15th, 2020

Presentations & Videos

- OCP TAP - Vision

- TAP Presentation

- Impact of Oscillator Noise on PTP Time Error – Part 1

- Impact of Oscillator Noise on PTP Time Error – Part 2

References & External Links

- Stanford Paper for reference only, raised by Hesham

- Spanner Paper for reference only, raised by Kelvin

- Practical Uses of Synchronized Clocks in Distributed Systems for reference only, raised by Elad

- On Time Synchronization Issues in Time-Sensitive Networks with Regulators and Nonideal Clocks for reference only, raised by Elad