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.

Mission Statement

1. Create specifications and references for Data Center Timing appliances, applications and networking infrastructure

2. Promote openness in Timing Appliances and interfaces through open-source implementations

Project Leadership

Leads:

- Ahmad Byagowi (Facebook)

- Elad Wind (NVIDIA)

Interim IC Rep:

- Rajeev Sharma (OCP)

Workstreams

	Project	Objective	POC	Meeting Schedule
#1	Open Source Grandmaster	Development of an open source grandmaster for DC and Edge systems	Oleg Obleukhov & Dotan Levi	discussed during project call
#2	Data Center PTP Profile	Development of a PTP Profile tailored for data center applications	Michel Ouellette	discussed during project call
#3	Precision Time API	Time APIs to disseminate the time error (error bound) and bring accurate time to the user space	Georgi Chalakov	discussed during project call
#4	Oscillators	Classification and measuring of oscillators	Gary Giust	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

- OCP Presentation Template - please contact Michael Schill or Archna Haylock for a copy

Release Candidates (RC) Docs

Name	Format	Version	Date	Contributor	Link
Open Source Grandmaster	MD	v0.1	Nov-23, 2020	OCP TAP	GitHub
Data Center PTP Profile	PDF	v0.1	Nov-27, 2020	OCP TAP	Dropbox

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

	Date	Meeting	Slides
#16	February 24th, 2021	GNSS Timing, by Samuli Pietila
#15	February 10th, 2021	Centralized GNSS Monitoring and Assurance, by Nir Laufer
#14	January 27th, 2021	Huygens and its applications, by Prof. Balaji
#13	January 13th, 2021	TAP 2020 Recap, 2021 Plans	Slides

#12	December 16th, 2020	Chip Scaled Atomic Clocks by John Kitching	Slides
#11	December 2nd, 2020	Data Center PTP Profile, Workstream #2 proposal
#10	November 18th, 2020	Computer Timekeeping and Synchronization	Slides
#9	November 4th, 2020	Time Sync in TSNs	Slides
#8	October 21st, 2020	Starter's guide to ptp4l	Slides
#7	October 7th, 2020	Timing card implementation
#6	September 23rd, 2020	Practical Use Cases of Synchronized Clocks
#5	September 9th, 2020	PTP workstream goals and draft spec
#4	August 26th, 2020	Open Grandmaster workstream goals and draft spec
#3	August 12th, 2020	A. TAP Vision B. Impact of Precision Oscillator Noise on PTP Time Error
#2	July 29th, 2020	Detailed Project Proposal and Discussion
#1	July 15th, 2020	Proposal to launch OCP-TAP Incubation Project